The Art School Dance

by Maria Blanca Alonso

  As I gathered together the things I’d need for college in the morning I took another look at Stephen’s portrait and found it as unsatisfactory as ever; the slight smile I wanted from him seemed like a sneer, or, even worse, a cruel gash across his face, with no sentiment in it, no sensitivity. It occurred to me that having it there, in that room, was a little like sharing the womb with another person’s child; bringing Stephen there diminished the security the room afforded, diluted the life which had previously pulsed with such a strong creative force. It was almost as if whatever was missing in Stephen, that something which left him no more than flesh and bone, was being sought after by him each time he entered, being inhaled along with the smell of the paint and the oils, slowly being drained from the room and drawn into him. He was taking too much, giving too little.

  Chapter Four

  I had the carcass of meat sketched out lightly in charcoal on the canvas; the rail from which it hung was like the horizontal beam of a cross, there was bone and gristle where a crucified person’s ribcage would have been and lower down the torso tapered into two stumpy legs, blunt and bloody. I began to fill in the tone using various shades of sienna, giving the composition some weight and substance before adding any true colour or detail, and the canvas gave gently under the touch of the brush, a wonderful feeling which had me almost purring with delight. I whistled softly as I worked, unladylike but contented, quite oblivious to my surroundings.

  ‘This looks as if it might be a bit gory,’ said a voice, and I turned to see Paula, dressed –since it wasn’t a Tuesday- in her secretarial outfit, a pen behind her ear protruding from her fine blonde hair, looking so smart and efficient. She was like a flower in a weed patch among the scruffs who frequent the art school, and for some reason, for just one brief moment, I felt conscious of my paint stained jeans and torn tee shirt. I, who thought I had learned to see beyond the superficial, was suddenly concerned about my appearance.

  The embarrassment was short-lived, though, I quickly overcame it, said ‘good morning’ to Paula and then agreed, ‘Yes, I think it might well turn out to be a bit bloody.’

  Paula took another step or two forward, stood beside me. ‘A crucifixion, perhaps? After Francis Bacon?’

  I was surprised that she recognised the influence, glanced from the painting to Paula and back again. ‘Yes, there’s a slight similarity I suppose.’

  ‘All you need now is the pope screaming in the background.’

  Now it was one thing for Paula to recognise the influence of Bacon, but to know that he also painted screaming pontiffs, anguished versions of Velasquez, suggested a rather more comprehensive knowledge of the artist. Despite my surprise at the remark, however, I realised immediately that Paula might have an idea here, in her mention of the pope, for wouldn’t the pope indeed be screaming, in the style of Bacon, if he saw a crucifixion painted by Bacon? I put down my brush, looked back at Paula and then at the canvas, and my surprise must have been obvious for Paula laughed, red lips parting from pure white teeth, and told me to carry on, not to mind her, she’d only come in for a coffee.

  She walked over to the vending machine which was in a corner of the studio, slim heels tapping delicately on the tiled floor, and I saw her skirt hitch up slightly as she raised her arm to drop a coin in the slot. She had a pleasing shape to her legs, the flesh at the back of her knee –was there a particular name for that part of the anatomy?- looked beautifully soft and for a moment I wondered: what the hell was I doing painting a dead piece of meat?

  When Paula came back from the coffee machine I offered her a cigarette, which she took, and we sat on stools before the canvas like a middle aged couple watching television.

  ‘So how come you know so much about Francis Bacon?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t, not a lot. You shouldn’t be so arrogant as to think that all blondes are dumb, though.’ Paula said this with a gay little laugh that had her hair dancing about her shoulders. ‘I may not know-’

  I interrupted her, thinking of what Stephen might have said, begged her, ‘Please, please don’t tell me you don’t know much about art but you know what you like.’

  ‘I wasn’t about to so don’t insult me!’ Paula bristled, giving me a punch on the arm.

  ‘Sorry,’ I apologised.

  ‘What I was going to say is that I might not know as much as you students, or the staff, but I’m bound to have picked up a bit of knowledge after working here for five years. I type out the lecture notes, remember. Some of that sinks in. And I see all the work you do. It’s only natural I should pick up a bit here and there. I’m not too old to learn.’

  Which was how old, exactly? If she had worked at the college since leaving school, or maybe after a secretarial course, she could be in her mid twenties perhaps.

  After my second apology we had an engagingly cultured conversation while everyone else was taking a break in the canteen, and when Paula had finished her coffee and returned to her office I continued with my painting. The carcass of beef progressed nicely, gradually becoming more solid, taking on substance, a very real weight; colours became stronger, to give depth to certain parts and bring others forward, the canvas was no longer a flat object but became increasingly three-dimensional, you could almost feel what an effort it would take to grip the meat in your hands and lift it from the surface. This was how a painting should progress, and was precisely how my portrait of Stephen was not progressing. When I got home that night I tried to improve on it, without having Stephen posing before me, tried to make it seem at least as real as the slab of beef; as it was the face was flat, only one side could be seen and you couldn’t imagine there being another, it was no more real than one of those old Victorian silhouettes; though it had colour it was lifeless and might as well have been black and white. I struggled with the painting for an hour or two before giving up, returned to it the following evening and the evening after that but made little progress. Even when Stephen came around I still had difficulties.

  ‘How’s it coming?’ he asked, perched on the edge of the bed.

  ‘Fine,’ I lied, because I was grateful for his patience and didn’t want him to think he was wasting his time.

  ‘Is it nearly finished?’

  ‘Soon, I think.’

  The fact of the matter was that the more I worked on it the more animal the image became, as if there was something bestial about Stephen which was coming to the surface; at one point I had been concerned with making him look handsome, but now it had got to the stage where I was only concerned with making him look normal. Even this was beyond me and time was running out, I had promised him the painting as a Christmas present and the holiday was only weeks away. Time and again I had to look hard at Stephen, and for longer and longer periods; he was nothing like the portrait, not bestial in the way that it was; there might have been times when I sensed something missing in him, some inner spark, but nonetheless he had a surface beauty which was becoming more and more elusive as I tried to capture it on canvas.

  For once I was grateful to hear Stephen talk about his day, it distracted me, I listened and even encouraged him and my interest pleased him, he chatted incessantly and the smiles he gave me were warm and fond. After two hours of work, the customary length of our sessions, I was glad to put away my things, to turn the painting to the wall once more even though little improvement had been made. The evening had gone well in Stephen’s view, though, the lengthy conversation I’d drawn from him had him in such a mellow and contented mood that he made no protest when I massaged his neck without first washing my hands, succumbed to a caress and a kiss or two without complaining about the smell of turpentine. We had a minute or two of intimacy, but no more, for Gran and my mother were aware of how long I usually spent on the painting and one or other of them would come up to the room if we lingered too long; we went downstairs, then, to the living room, and I asked Stephen if he’d like a cup of tea.

  ‘Yes, smashing,’ he said. ‘I’ll make it, though; yours is always
too weak.’

  ‘Isn’t that what I’m forever telling her,’ Gran chipped in, from her usual chair by the fire. ‘Her tea’s too weak and her toast’s too crisp every time. You make it nice and strong, son. You know better than her how to do it.’

  ‘Not much use in the kitchen, is she?’ Stephen grinned, such a trite thing to say.

  ‘Except for washing up,’ Gran chuckled.

  I sat down and waited, frowning; Stephen would get no help from me after a comment like that, and though Gran smiled at me I knew that it was only because of Stephen. In a whisper the old lady said what a wonderful lad he is.

  As the kettle boiled my mother came in from the front room, where she’d been been sewing.

  ‘A cup of tea?’ Stephen called through from the kitchen.

  ‘Yes please, love,’ she answered, and Gran smiled again with a smugness that annoyed me.

  Stephen brought the tea things through and played ‘mother’, filling the cups and handing them around with an irksome dignity.

  ‘Lovely, just like a cup of tea should be,’ said Gran, slurping at the cup, her lips puckering as they sucked at the rim, and Stephen smiled proudly, as if it was important that he should impress my family.

  Stephen had learned a lot about impressing people since he started work. He was polite, he spoke as they did about inconsequential things, idle gossip and tittle-tattle. I switched on the television, though there was nothing of interest showing, and waited for them to finish their chat.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be getting off now?’ I said to Stephen, when I thought the conversation was dragging on for too long. ‘It’s getting late.’

  He looked at his watch. ‘Yes, I suppose I ought to be going. Do you want to stroll part of the way with me?’

  I got his coat from the hall, and to my annoyance even this afforded a subject for further conversation; it was admired, its material fingered, he was asked where he bought it and heads nodded approvingly when he answered, acknowledging that Stephen was going up in the world. Donning my own jacket soon put an end to all that, for I wore the leather one with my name on the back.

  ‘You’re not going to shame Stephen by wearing that, are you?’ said Gran.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ said Stephen.

  ‘It’s dark, no one’s going to notice,’ I told Gran.

  ‘But why ‘da Vinci’? Are you ashamed of your father’s name, is that it? Going to change it by deed poll, are you?’

  It did sound like some kind of arrogant self-recommendation, I had to concede, in the same way that my signature –‘V.Fair’, never Virginia Fair- looked like a teacher’s report whenever I put it to a piece of paper, but there was no point in starting an argument, Gran and I had had the same one many times before, so I took Stephen by the arm and led him to the door as he called out his goodbyes. We walked along the street at a fairly brisk rate, and it occurred to me that perhaps Stephen was a little ashamed of the way I dressed after all. That would never change me, though, he could take me as I was or he could drop me.

  Maybe this was what I wanted, and I wondered if Stephen would ever leave me of his own accord. It would certainly ease my conscience if, when the time came, he was the one to make the break, but I didn’t think I wanted the break to come just yet, nor even as soon as it eventually did, or in the way that it came about. And it was quite apparent that Stephen didn’t want to bring an end to our romance just yet either, for around the corner from his house, in the shadow of an alleyway, he paused to embrace me and we kissed as we had done when we first met, furtively and with an adolescent ardour. This had to be the one thing that bound me to him, I thought, the brief moment of passion, the regular physical release. Perhaps without this I would have found the creative aspect of my life hindered, distracted by frustrations. In this respect I still needed Stephen, for a little while longer at least; in this respect I would admit to being selfish.

  *

  The following morning, in defeat and desperation, I decided to take Stephen’s portrait into college, to work on it there in the hope that I might finish it by Christmas, thinking that I might get some advice on what was wrong and what could be done with it.

  To my astonishment people were enthusiastic when they saw it. Ben noted a vitality in the painting, a vibrant animal quality; Maggie, the painting tutor, said that it was not just a portrait but a portrait of a living person; Ian, the printmaker, qualified this by adding that the person was not just any living person but a person who had ‘lived’. Even Gus liked it, says that I was really starting to paint at last, and there were others among the students who were also complimentary.

  This praise was all very well, quite gratifying, but I was still left with the problem of pleasing Stephen; he was expecting a painting he could show to his parents, something they could be proud of, and they weren’t going to be too pleased to see their only son looking like an ageing orang-utan. During the morning break I took Maggie to one side and explained my dilemma to her. She was usually the most sympathetic of the three tutors and she listened attentively to what I had to say, rolling herself one of her awful cigarettes wrapped in liquorice paper. In her mid thirties, I suppose she could have been attractive if she tried, but she never seemed prepared to make the effort; her hair was always in need of a wash and brush, her clothes were scruffy and she stank of the foulest smelling tobacco imaginable.

  Pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose, puffing out a noxious cloud of smoke, she said, ‘Look here, Ginny darling, who do you want to please, yourself and your peers or your boyfriend and his folks? The painting is good, so why do you want to spoil it by making it look like some bloke from the pages of a fashion magazine? If you want to be an artist you can’t think about other people’s feelings, only the truth.’

  ‘But the truth of the matter is that Stephen doesn’t look like that,’ I pointed out.

  ‘I should fucking well hope not!’ she laughed, choking on the yellow-brown fog she exhaled. ‘Christ! I wouldn’t like to wake up in the morning with a face like that on the pillow next to mine!’ I was about to tell her that I never woke up with any face on the pillow next to mine, when she went on: ‘The further truth of the matter, the most important truth, is that the painting says something about people in general and not just the particular person you know as Stephen. It says that there are people who are predatory, people who are cunning, people who are driven by animal instincts. You leave the painting as it is, Ginny; it’ll go a long way to getting you a place on a degree course.’

  This was the deciding factor, of course, leaving Sleepers Hill for some place better, but still I was a little troubled. ‘What about his Christmas present, though?’ I asked.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, girl!’ Maggie said, impatient with what she saw as a confusion of priorities. ‘Buy him some cheap bloody aftershave!’

  ‘But he was expecting something special.’

  ‘Calvin bloody Klein, then!’

  I stayed silent for a moment, deliberating, plucking up courage; then I took a couple of photographs from my pocket and showed them to Maggie. ‘This is Stephen,’ I told her.

  ‘Yes, very handsome, though perhaps a little too chubby around the cheeks.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you could, er, knock something up for me from one of these snaps? You know, a portrait he might like.’

  ‘Knock something up’? Don't be so fucking insulting!’ she said, standing and storming off in a temper, muttering to herself, grumbling that I, an art student, should have known better than to ask.

  There was no one else I dared approach, I was stuck, I met Stephen that night in the ‘Crofters’ where the lights were so bright that they hid my burning cheeks; I told him that the portrait was finished and he was pleased, he naturally wanted to see it.

  ‘There’s a slight problem there,’ I said. ‘You see, the tutors all think it’s so good that it could be the one piece that swings a place on a degree course for me.’

  ‘That good?’

  �
��That’s what they say, and if I’m going to take heed of their advice I really need to keep it with the rest of my work, include it in my portfolio. So you see, it’s not going to be possible to give it you for Christmas.’

  ‘I’m disappointed,’ Stephen confessed, and this was obvious, his head was bowed and his lips were pouting into a sulk. ‘I understand, though.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, looking up and smiling. ‘You’ll still let me see it, though? You’ll let me show it to Mum and Dad?’

  ‘Certainly,’ I lied. ‘I’ll bring it back from college just as soon as the varnish has dried.’

  *

  Though the problem of the portrait was solved, though I had found an excuse not to give it to Stephen as a Christmas present and would think of other excuses to prevent him ever seeing it, I was now presented with the subsequent problem of finding money for an alternative gift. The next instalment of my student loan wouldn’t arrive until the New Year, I was going to be short of cash for Christmas as it was, and the only answer I could think of was to tout around for work. The market hall was the obvious place to do this, since most of the stall-holders knew me, so on the first Saturday in December I made a tour of the place, early in the morning before the crowds arrive. I didn’t hold out much hope, had always been pessimistic when it came to matters of my personal prosperity, but surprisingly I managed to get a couple of jobs. Old Mrs Littlehales, who ran the button stall –that was all she sold, thousands and thousands of buttons of all shapes and sizes- she needed the sign over her stall repainting, and Arthur, my butcher pal, wanted a few posters to advertise his Christmas offers on turkeys and the like. It wouldn’t not bring me much money, perhaps a few pounds plus the cost of materials, but every little bit helped for a penniless art student and I agreed to do the work.

  ‘You’re prostituting your talents,’ Gus told me, when he found out. ‘And so early in your career, too. This is a poor start, Ginny.’