by Bryony Doran
He looks up at her again. ‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty-two.’
He scratches his head. ‘I didn’t think anyone of twenty-two could draw like this. It’s that old bloke isn’t it?’
‘Edward? Yes,’ she says.
‘Where did you get the idea from? How did you get him to pose? Bloody hell, I’m jealous. Do you think he’d model for the college?’
She shakes her head. She can’t take in what he’s saying. ‘Outstanding,’ is that what he’d said?
‘He’d be a great bloke to sculpt, don’t you think?’ He picks up another drawing. ‘Fabulous.’
She feels a warm glow rising in her chest. She wants to cry. ‘You’re being serious, aren’t you? You’re not just kidding me?’
‘I’ve never been more serious in my life. I knew you were good, but not this good. This work is truly inspirational.’
She doesn’t know what to say.
‘I’m proud you’re a student of mine.’ He looks up at her, searching her face as if seeing her for the first time, and then back down at the drawing he has in his hand, ‘You’ve really captured something here. There is a great vulnerability and,’ he pauses, ‘a tenderness, an intimacy … all his life … this man …’
‘Edward,’ she interjects.
‘… has probably been regarded as a freak, grotesque even, and yet you’ve totally transformed him, shown that beauty is not only in … in uniformity, in the expected. Such honesty is breathtaking, outstanding. I have only one criticism. I can’t accept the work just in one medium. It’s not enough. I need to see your use of other materials, other colours. Oils? You’ve done some fantastic work in oils.’
‘I knew you were going to say that.’
‘Then why …’
She interrupts, ‘I have done a few in red pastel.’
He shuffles through the drawings, ‘Two. It’s not enough, Ange, I need more.’
‘Well, you see,’ she clasps the back of her neck. ‘I might have a problem there. Edward seems to have done a disappearing act, doesn’t he?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘We sort of had a bit of a fall out before I went to Cornwall, and when I came back he was nowhere to be found. He’s not at work. He’s not at his lodgings.’ She shrugs, ‘I don’t know where he is.’
‘I saw him, you know, the other day, he was sitting in that café down the road from here. You know, the one just down from the shoe shop.’
‘Damn! I wish I’d seen him.’ She nods towards her work. ‘I could do some colour wash.’
He holds a picture, looks down at it. ‘Do you think people might think you’ve exploited him?’
‘No, I don’t. I did occasionally think about that when I was drawing him and, oh, I don’t know. What do you think?’
‘If you had portrayed him like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, then maybe there would be an element of exploitation. But you haven’t. You’ve shown him warts and all, so to speak. There is such an honesty comes through that you can’t help but see the person – the man behind the deformity. In fact you’ve even captured, well, I hesitate to say this, a certain sexuality.’ He holds up a drawing of Edward, legs spread out, his bottom on the edge of his chair.
‘Sexuality?’
She looks down at Edward, a languid pose. He is looking straight at her and yet her eyes are inclined to his genitals which he is displaying with pride. She had drawn it, and yet not seen it. She is taken aback, how can this be?
‘Can’t you see it?’
‘Yes,’ her voice is almost a whisper. ‘I suppose I can.’
He looks over at her and smiles, shaking his head. ‘You’re a funny girl, never have been able to work you out.’
‘And now?’
‘Now even less. I wonder what your parents would say.’
‘Why do you bring them up, for God’s Sake?’
‘You said they were artists, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, but they’re smackheads. What would they care?’
‘Have you never thought they might still be artists?
Where do you think you inherited your talent from?’
‘What?’ She wishes she’d never told him about her parents.
‘For drawing. A double measure if both parents are artists. I think you ought to seek them out.’ He looks down at one of her drawings. ‘They would be really proud of you.’
‘What the fuck do you know about it?’ She bites her lip to stop it wobbling.
He shakes his head and smiles at her. ‘How judgemental are the young.’
She screws up her face, tries to stop herself from crying. ‘Why do you have to be so bloody patronising?’
‘Look at this work,’ he says. ‘Can’t I be excited for you?’
She stands up, crossing her arms over her chest, steadies her voice. ‘So what shall I do?’ She indicates her work laid out on the bench, ‘About submitting.’
‘Leave these with me.’ He looks down at her portfolio. ‘Not only is your work exceptional, you’ve presented it beautifully too. You’re a real professional. I’m going to recommend you to be put forward for the postgrad scholarship. I’m being picky about the different mediums, you’ll walk a first with these, but I just want that extra mile from you, so I’ll hold off for a week, see if you can do some oil.’
‘And if I can’t?’
He picks up the drawing of Edward on the couch. ‘I just want to move you up a notch from outstanding to phenomenal. It goes without saying you’ll be entered for this year’s college competition, you’ll blow them away.’
She shakes her head. ‘I don’t know what to say. I’m shocked.’
‘You knew this was good, didn’t you?’
She slides the work back into her portfolio, ‘Not sure.’ She thinks back to her sessions with Edward, how excited she’d felt, ‘Yes, I suppose I did.’
‘Phenomenal!’ The word keeps bouncing around in her head as she waits at the bus stop. ‘Phenomenal!’ She is so excited, she has to tell someone. Claudette? She will ring her when she gets in. It hits her then like a wall of sadness: The one person more than anyone else in the world that she wants to tell. Couldn’t she have waited just a few more months? She kicks the bottom panel of the shelter. The metal dongs back at her.
The trees on the skyline are still thin black bones in the sky. Her granddad dead, Claudette dead, how can she leave her gran and go to London? If only Claudette were still alive she would have come up with a solution. She thinks back to the funeral, staring up at the crows circling the black trees. Glancing across the grave and being captivated by Edward and his mother. Claudette had given her Edward. Without her dying she would never have found Edward. She must find him again.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Rachel gets up that morning with the intention of giving the back room a good bottoming, and cleaning the French windows so the whole garden gleams back at her.
She doesn’t bother getting washed or dressed, but instead slips her old housecoat over her nightdress. When she has finished cleaning, she intends to pack herself some lunch and catch the bus into town; maybe go to the gallery above the library. She hasn’t been there in years. She could see if Edward is back at work. She stands back from the window, searching for any rogue traces of Windowlene she may have missed.
She hears a knock on the door, perhaps the milkman. She looks at the clock, 11.30. It can’t be, maybe the postman. She scoops the slumbering cat off the chair and goes to open the front door. There is no one there. She looks up and down the street, no one. She hears the side gate banging against the catch. Holding the cat closer to her, she steps outside onto the wet concrete in her bedroom slippers. She waits. Someone is knocking on the side door.
‘Hello?’ she shouts.
The gate clicks shut and, from behind the overgrown Buddleia bush, Angela emerges. Rachel steps back onto her threshold, stroking the cat harshly between the ears. She says nothing.
Angela looks up at her from the garden
path and smiles shyly, ‘Sorry. I forgot you used your front door.’
Rachel nods.
‘I’d have rung only I’ve lost your number.’
Rachel looks down at her cat, ‘I see.’
The girl advances towards her, then hesitates. ‘Do you mind if I come in?’
Rachel wants to refuse, but instead steps aside, her back pressing against her front door. Angela wipes her feet on the coconut mat. Rachel nods in the direction of the kitchen. She is stunned. Caught unwashed and undressed, she lets the girl enter her kitchen. She motions to a chair, ‘Excuse me? I’ll just get dressed.’ She closes the kitchen door.
Angela sits at the kitchen table. She can hear Rachel moving about upstairs. She wishes she hadn’t come. She has spooked the old bird by turning up unannounced and catching her all unawares in her scruffy old housecoat.
Delving into her rucksack she brings out the old-fashioned photo album that she had purloined from Claudette’s. She places it on the table, smoothing her hand over its leather surface. She glances around the room. Under the window is an old pot Belfast sink. She stands up and walks over to the window. The sink has a tarnished brass plughole and a large rubber plug in swirls of green and white like the inside cover of an old book. She remembers the Belfast sink her gran had before her modernisation purge. It had the same plug but with pink swirls instead of green. Her gran would fill the sink to brimming and place her in it. The water would spill over the side and her gran would always tell her off for being careless.
To the right of the window is a rack with willow pattern plates, blue on white, the bridge where the lovers meet, the willow tree hanging low. The cups are on white hooks under the cupboard. The kitchen has the smell of an old person about it; old people, food, cabbage and the linger of pork dripping. A slight draught comes in through the cat flap at the bottom of the door. Angela can feel it around her ankles. It lifts, ever so slightly, a white envelope lying on the coconut mat. She crouches to pick it up, Edward’s handwriting. She shakes her head, what a funny pair. She props the envelope against a small glass vase of snowdrops in the centre of the scrubbed pine table and then sits back down again.
She hears Rachel coming back down the stairs. She turns in her chair, waiting, a cautious smile on her face. ‘I hope you didn’t mind me coming.’
Silence.
Angela feels she should say something else but the words stick in her throat. She hesitates and then stands up. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come.’
Rachel looks at her, mouth pulled tight. She has on a beige dress and a necklace of tiger-eye beads. She’s put on her armour, Angela thinks.
‘Come unannounced, I mean. Sorry, I’ll go.’ She picks up her rucksack.
The cat jumps out of Rachel’s arms. She smiles a cold hard smile, ‘Why did you come?’
Angela blushes, stammers, ‘I wondered if you’d seen anything of Edward, or you’d got his new address.’ She flumps her shoulders, ‘I can’t find him anywhere.’
Rachel’s voice is icy. ‘I think that is my business, don’t you?’
‘Sorry, I don’t understand.’
‘My son’s whereabouts are my business. If he wanted to see you he’d contact you.’
‘Yes, but I need to see him. It’s important.’
‘What, so you can take further advantage of the poor man? Tell me, why on earth do you want to draw his poor deformed body,’ she pauses for breath. ‘What do you intend to do with the pictures when you have completed them? Parade them in front of the whole world?’
‘But it’s not like that.’
‘Isn’t it? It looks very much like it from where I’m standing.’
Angela looks down at the black and white tiles. She presses her teeth hard together. Don’t cry, she says to herself, for God’s sake, don’t cry. ‘I thought you of all people, Mrs Anderson, would’ve understood.’
‘Oh, I understand. I understand very well.’
‘I see his body as something different, a thing of beauty.’
‘Yes, that’s it, isn’t it? A thing!’
‘I didn’t mean it like that. I didn’t force him to do it,’ she ends on a plaintive note.
‘No, you didn’t have to. Any man like Edward would be flattered to receive the attentions of a young girl like you.’
‘But we are good friends.’ She looks up, still gritting her teeth, willing herself not to cry. ‘I really like him.’
Rachel snorts, ‘Oh, I bet you do. I’m sure he suits your purpose admirably.’
Angela says nothing but takes the two short steps to the back door, putting her hand up to the Yale lock. She tugs at the latch. It does not open. She struggles in silence, eventually yanking it free.
By the time she reaches the garden gate the tears are already dropping from her jaw. ‘What a bitch! What a bitch! What a bitch!’ She repeats to herself over and over again.
There is a woman with a perm and a prim face coming towards her along the street. Angela crosses the road and sees a footpath that leads down to a small river. The bank, spread with weeping willows, slopes steeply to the water’s edge. Over the other side of the river she can see the main road and the tops of buses and lorries. She sits down on her rucksack and cries in huge, self-indulgent sobs.
Why had Rachel been so horrid to her? Edward was right about her; she was a bitch. But why had he told her about the sittings? When he’d asked her not to mention it. She shouldn’t have gone to see the old cow in the first place. Why had she wanted to be friends with an old witch like that anyway? She starts to cry again.
She remembers in her rucksack the present she had bought for Rachel, two handmade chocolates in the shape of cats, one each for them to have with their cup of tea. The cellophane bags are tied with little yellow ribbons, the ends stretched so that the ribbons curl back on themselves. She tears the bag open and eats both the cats, heads first, then smiles to herself thinking, had she really been so insensitive?
Was that how other people would see it? That she was using Edward? Alex hadn’t seen it like that. In the first instance, her reason for drawing him had been his deformity, she had to admit that, but after a while it all sort of linked, became part of him. She’d never thought to study the deeper reasons for the deformity. She recalls his analogy of a basket and smiles. It would be interesting to see the inner workings. She could even do some sketches.
In the university library she searches for a book on spinal deformities. She finds pictures of spines writhing like the skeletons of snakes. X-rays of backs pinned and rodded and straightened and yet, still left scarred and imperfect. She makes lots of quick sketches. For the first time, she feels the enormity of what Edward has to put up with. She had never imagined for one minute the twisting and turning that had gone on in Edward’s body to create the shape he is. Had it ever really impacted on her that he might be in real pain and not just grumbling in his usual way? Had she ever really taken his disability into account, tried to make things more comfortable for him? He was always going on about how awful she was. Well, he was right. All she had cared about was drawing him, as if he were little more than an odd-shaped vase.
She looks down at the sketches she has made. These could work in really well with the charcoal drawings. It is dark outside. She hopes she has not missed the last bus.
Angela clutches her pink hot water bottle and snuggles further down the bed. She listens to the rain lashing against the window. What would Paul be doing now? Would he be out at sea, in the dark? She wonders if he has even given her a second thought, whether he had those sort of encounters all the time. That night it had felt as if something inside her had been unleashed, but it wasn’t just that night was it? It had it happened once before, in the studio. Maybe she should have stayed in Cornwall an extra couple of days, seen Paul again, banished these stupid thoughts she’s had of Edward. She is mixing her art up with her emotions.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
That morning on his way to work, Edward is gripped by a se
nse of trepidation. It increases as he walks along Surrey Street. When he reaches the library steps he pauses. Already, there is a beggar in place between the pillars.
‘Spare any change, mister?’
It is a young girl with a black and white collie. Just acknowledge us, he’d read in the Big Issue. We don’t mind if you don’t give us any money, just don’t pretend we’re not there. Edward has never given money to a beggar before, ‘Good morning, young lady.’
She looks up at him. Her face is very pale, her eyes are grey; her voice, flat and low. ‘Can you spare any change?’
Edward wants to know what she will do with the money if he gives it to her. ‘It’s a bit cold to be sitting out here, isn’t it?’
‘Can you spare any change?’ Like a stuck record, he thinks. He feels in his pocket for a few coppers but it’s empty. He takes his wallet out of his breast pocket and looks in the note section. There are two ten-pound notes and a blue five-pound note. He gives her the five-pound note. She looks up into his face. Her eyes are grey, clear, like Angela’s.
‘Thanks, mister.’ Her voice is still flat. He looks for more response, but she is busily stroking her dog.
Edward’s new-found sense of generosity sits like warm bread on his chest. He doesn’t go straight down to the archives but takes the lift to personnel. Stick in hand, he waits to be seen.
‘Yes, Mr Anderson, what can we do for you?’
‘I was wondering,’ he coughs, ‘it being my first day back from sick leave, whether I could apply to work in a different department.’
‘Why, may I ask?’ The man peers at him over his glasses. ‘You are very much valued in the archive department you know?’
‘It’s just that, well, it gets a bit claustrophobic working down there in the archives.’
‘Usually we would be able to offer you a job in another department, even if only temporarily, but one of the women in your section,’ he looks down at the papers on his desk, ‘Janice Brown, has just gone on maternity leave. So I’m sorry, but you’ll have to fit back into your old slot.’