The Art School Dance

by Maria Blanca Alonso

  With smiles and barely disguised nudges the young men seated themselves, the arrangement as before, as if they had agreed on partners; the conversation resumed on much the same level, as regards volume and content, and the bloke at my side shuffled close to me, almost falling into my lap in a fit of laughter at one of Tina’s crude wisecracks. I turned away, despairingly, looked across the bar and saw Paula enter with a couple of friends.

  I tried to hide my face but Paula saw me and waved, called over, ‘Hi there Ginny!’

  The others looked at her, Tina and Diane and the three young men.

  ‘Who’s that?’ asked Tina.

  I heard one of the young men pass some covetous comment, another gave a low admiring whistle.

  I whispered to Tina. ‘Remember what you said before, about a girl having to be a tart to take her clothes off in front of people?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘And I said that if you saw her walking along the street you wouldn’t think that?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Doesn’t look anything like a tart, does she?’ I smiled.

  Tina looked again at Paula, trying to picture her without any clothes. ‘You mean that’s her?’

  ‘Fucking gorgeous,’ one of the blokes decided.

  Chapter Six

  I was staring at the canvas of crucified beef, trying to decide if there was any room to fit in a screaming pontiff, when Paula sneaked up on me and mentioned something about the twelve days of Christmas.

  I automatically responded with, ‘My true love sent to me?’

  ‘Can you work the twelve days up to Christmas? That’s what I’ve managed to arrange for you.’

  ‘That’ll be great,’ I said, thinking of all the money to be earned, but then asked, ‘Can I, though? Term doesn’t finish until the eighteenth.’

  ‘It’ll be alright, Ben will give you a bit of leeway,’ Paula assured me. ‘There’s not all that much happening during the last week of term, in any case, apart from trips to the pub. You’ll have to miss out on those, I’m afraid.’

  I shrugged. ‘We all have to make sacrifices.’

  ‘For the ones we love?’ Paula smiled, and I grimaced. She asked, ‘So which was one was Stephen?’

  ‘Which one?’ I said, then realise she was thinking of the three young blokes she’d seen me with. ‘Oh, he wasn’t one of those,’ I told her, embarrassed that she should imagine me getting involved with callow youths like that.

  ‘No?’ she said, and her smile took on the character that was often described as ‘knowing’, almost a smirk.

  ‘No! And before you suggest it, no, I wasn’t being a two-timer or whatever you want to call it.’

  ‘It’s not for me to pass comment if you were,’ Paula said, but her barely contained grin demanded that I make further excuses.

  ‘I just went for a drink with a couple of old pals,’ I said. ‘It was them who wanted to chat up the lads.’

  ‘Yes? And you didn’t enjoy the evening, then?’

  Actually, I hadn’t, the one I had been paired with had grown less and less attractive as the night wore on and had had the nerve to complain because I couldn’t afford to share the fare for a taxi home. The cheek of the boy, expecting that a kiss and a cuddle in a shop doorway would buy him a chauffeur driven ride home.

  ‘You’d rather have been with your boyfriend, then?’ Paula supposed, and answered for me. ‘Yes, of course you would. Why else would you be working so hard to earn the money for her Christmas present?’

  I frowned. It was difficult to explain exactly why, and suddenly it seemed that Paula was as silent as a priest in a confessional, waiting for my confidences. I had to admit that there was the need for money to buy Stephen a present, since he could no longer have the portrait, but over and above this consideration there was the simple desire to have a little more cash. Paula nodded when I complained of how depressing it was at times, trying to manage on little, nodded as if she understood from experience. I wondered again how old she was, if she had been to college herself.

  ‘What does your boyfriend do for a living?’

  ‘Works in an office.’

  ‘An odd combination,’ Paula thought. ‘An office worker and an art student.’

  There was an unspoken agreement that Paula’s own secretarial role was not to be compared with Stephen’s.

  ‘Yes, it’s starting to seem that way,’ I agreed. ‘It’s a bit of a strain at times.’

  ‘Awkward.’

  ‘It’s getting hard to cope with, I think.’

  ‘You don’t seem to have much in common any more?’

  ‘Nothing at all in common,’ I realised. ‘Nothing apart from the teenage years we shared, and what we shared then doesn’t interest me any longer.’

  ‘That can happen in a lot of relationships,’ Paula understood, and I found myself speaking of things which I had kept to myself for so many weeks, talking of how Stephen suddenly seemed a stranger after so many years, confiding that I could now go for days without seeing him, where once I had needed him at every available moment.

  ‘He’s your first boyfriend?’

  ‘The first serious one,’ I said, and laughed even as Paula did, thinking of what this meant in Sleepers Hill.

  ‘They all say that around here, don’t they? They ask ‘is it serious’, like it’s a sickness or a complaint and they’re looking for a medical opinion. I’ve lost count of the number of times my mother’s asked the same thing of me.’

  ‘And you daren’t admit it’s serious, even if it is, because you’re frightened everyone will start making wedding plans.’

  ‘Right,’ Paula agreed, nodding her head vigorously. ‘But most of the time you can’t tell if it’s serious or not, so why can’t people leave well alone?’ She gave a soft sigh of exasperation. ‘They say northern people are friendly, that they’re always willing to help each other, but more often than not they’re just being plain bloody nosy if you ask me, poking into other folk’s business.’

  This was just the way I felt, and I enjoyed the chat with Paula until it was disturbed by people returning from lunch. Thinking over the conversation, later, it struck me that it had been very much like going to confession, and I remembered how comforting that used to be. Confession was on Thursday evenings and the church was never so quiet as it was then, only a score or so people to one side of the nave, waiting, some seated and some kneeling in prayer. There would be none of the constant shuffling and coughing of Sunday mass, you could sense the solemnity of the sacrament, belief hung thick in the air like incense. On Sundays the church was a bright and airy place, the high vaulted roof, the stained glass windows streaming light, but in the gloom of Thursday nights any sense of space was lost, there was a dark blanket like thunderclouds which weighed down on the penitents, and one by one they would enter the confessional, a dark box with wood panelled sides the colour of a wine cask, and speak their confessions through a fine mesh screen. The priest could be seen only as a vague profile, looking much like an Impressionist study or one of Seurat’s crayon drawings, and his voice would be low and grave, roughened by altar wine and the many cigarettes he smoked, as he encouraged the penitents to be open about their sins. There were venial sins, mortal sins, sins of omission, and they were absolved of them all, though not immediately, for more often than not there would be a discussion of the sins, their nature and their circumstances; eventually, though, the priest would recite the Latin absolution and impose the penance –Our Fathers, Hail Marys, decades of the Rosary- to be said in the main body of the church.

  I recognised then, after confiding in Paula, just how much I felt the loss of the sacrament, I understood the comfort it had afforded; it was as much a ceremony as a sacrament, a ritual which appeased the spirit rather than cleansed the soul, and it was always the mystery of such rites which held me to the church, this rather than that blind faith which was the comfort of others. My mother and Gran were devout Catholics still, despite all the troubles they had suffered,
but theirs was a truly blind faith; I felt sure that if their God was a good God then he would be forced to look kindly on my reasoned agnosticism, certainly more kindly than he would look on their unreasoned acceptance. If their God was good, that is.

  *

  I suppose that Sunday coming around further turned my thoughts to religion; with no religion other than my painting the holy day seemed such an empty day, nothing more than an interlude between one week and the next. My mother and Gran went to their usual early morning mass, and as always, just before they left and immediately on their return, there was an uncomfortable silence, looks cast in my direction which I could only regard as accusing; we no longer argued about the lapsing of my faith, but I always sensed their disapproval.

  Perhaps to ease the tension which would come with their return, and in some way make amends for their disappointment in me, I prepared breakfast for them -they would never eat before mass, they always went to communion- fried up platefuls of bacon, eggs, tomatoes, black pudding. I timed it just right and the food was ready as they came in and took off their coats, all they needed to do was sit down at the table.

  ‘This is nice,’ said my mother, pleased, but Gran just stood there, all dressed in black with a shiny silver brooch on the breast of her coat, and looked me up and down. I knew Gran was looking at my clothes, the paint stained jeans, and noting that since I hadn't got on a sober dress this meant that I wouldn’t be going to church at all. I told her to sit down and get her breakfast before it went cold -mother was already at the table- but she just stood there a moment or two longer, then turned away.

  ‘What about your breakfast?’ I asked her.

  ‘I need to go to my room and say the Rosary,’ Gran muttered, not even having the courtesy to face me as she spoke.

  I wanted to curse her as I listened to her slow step clumping up the stairs. Seething, I set about my own breakfast noisily, knife and fork flashing like the tools of a psychopath.

  ‘It’s Sunday,’ my mother excused the old lady, ‘and she always hopes you’ll go to church. So do I.’

  ‘And if I did would it make me as unchristian as her?’ I asked acidly.

  ‘Now there’s no need for you to say that, Ginny. You know she’s a good woman at heart.’

  To others, maybe, to her fellow church goers, but to me she was becoming a wicked and vindictive old hag. I couldn’t stomach Gran and I couldn’t stomach the food I’d cooked; I pushed my plate to one side and told my mother that I was going for a walk.

  *

  Luckily Sunday was only one seventh part of the week and it was soon over with, I was able to get back to work. I’d finished the painting of the meat a week or so before the end of term. In it the pope was wailing and screaming like someone demented, his face on the body of Arthur the butcher who I’d painted into the background, behind the carcass of meat, white apron spattered with blood and gore, a dripping cleaver in his hand. I’d reached that crucial point where I knew the work was finished, where to do any more would be to spoil it; the same went for the portrait of Stephen, and I was at a dead end. There was less than a week to go before I started work on the post, after that was the holiday, I didn’t want to begin another major work just then, there wouldn’t be time to get into it and it would be too easy to lose the rhythm. I passed the last days of the term with minor stuff, then, objective drawings to fill out my portfolio, still-lifes, sketches, studies of corners of the studio. And then came the last life session of the term.

  *

  Ben had Paula in a standing pose, against a low screen; the screen came just about up to her shoulder blades and she was slumped a little, one knee bent, her head lowered towards her chest and her elbows hooked over the top of the screen; her hands and lower arms hung loose and I thought of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian.

  ‘I hope you’re not going to make me look like your crucified lump of meat, Ginny,’ Paula joked, when she heard my remark on the resemblance to the martyrdom.

  ‘I’ll do my best not to,’ I promised her, and walked around for a while, looking for a good angle.

  Everyone else was quickly settled and just about the only place I could squeeze in also happened to provide me with the view I found easiest to draw; from where I positioned myself Paula’s face was turned away, I could see neither of her eyes, very little of her mouth, just the flicker of an eyelash and the swell of a cheekbone; one upper arm came almost straight at me, a tricky foreshortening, while the other was hidden from view, just the hand seen, fingers curling and seeming to be reaching towards the silhouette of her breast. It was a view more discovered than chosen, but I liked it and set to work.

  There were weeks when I struggled with a single piece of work and there were days when everything came together with no effort at all. This day was one of those rare ones, I had the pose outlined, the figure hanging as it should and not simply standing; all the tension was in the left elbow, which rested on the screen, and in the left leg which added more support; the hanging of the head was so forlorn. The perspective of the upper arm was a bit tricky but I scribbled away, feverishly but with a light touch, using a soft rubber here and there to change the angle of a line or two. The tone I applied is delicate, almost hesitantly added, and I thought of Ingres’ drawings as I worked, suggesting the form of the body economically, just a touch of darkness fading quickly from each line.

  Suddenly I was aware of Ben behind me, I felt his breath on the back of my neck and tensed; for a long while he said nothing, which was a bad sign.

  Finally, with great emphasis, he said, ‘Very wan, very much the agony of the young romantic. I’m reminded of the death of Chatterton.’

  ‘Chatterton died prone, on his back,’ I said, noting the sarcasm in his tone.

  ‘On a couch, yes, with one hand trailing ever so effeminately to the floor. I’m glad you’ve been paying attention to my art history lectures, Ginny; I always thought you just sat there with your eyes closed while the slides flashed across the screen.’

  ‘I’m always riveted by your lectures, Ben,’ I said, returning the sarcasm.

  ‘And so you bloody well should be after all the effort I put into them!’ he boomed, for the benefit of the others and not just me. ‘And now, this drawing of yours.’

  He reached forward, to take the pencil from me, but my hand clenched into a fist around it. ‘Oh no you don’t!’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘This is one drawing you’re not going to scribble over!’ I threw my arms across the board and shielded the drawing with my body; there was a delicacy in the drawing that I liked and I was not going to let him deface it with any brash clumsy strokes. ‘You’re not going to touch this one!’ I repeated.

  ‘Come on. Just-’

  ‘Just nothing! Get away!’

  ‘You think you know better than me?’ he challenged.

  ‘No,’ I said, and tried to sound threatening myself. ‘I know what I like, though, and I like this drawing just the way it is.’

  ‘Well bloody hell!’ Ben laughed, but moved on all the same, to threaten others who might be less brave, a little less protective about their drawings.

  My behaviour was remarked upon later by the others, who said it was rash of me to antagonise Ben like that. After all, it was only a drawing.

  Wasn’t it?

  *

  I packed away my things early that afternoon, deciding to meet Stephen when he finished work. I hadn’t seen much of him of late, and for the next fortnight I’d be busy working on the post, would have neither the time nor the energy to spare for him.

  I stowed my paints away in my locker, even washed my hands so Stephen wouldn’t mind me holding his, and was outside the offices where he worked in time for his five-thirty finish. A few minutes after the half hour the workers started to spill from the building in twos and threes, males and females, senior staff and juniors. Stephen walked from the door in the company of two slightly older men. Just as I was about to cross the street to greet him, th
ough, he saw me and scowled, hardened his mouth and gave a quick shake of the head.

  No? Keep away?

  This must be his meaning.

  I followed him and his two colleagues along to the bus stop, noting the neat haircuts and the smart suits, joined the queue for the bus some three or four places behind them. I couldn’t hear what was being said, but saw Stephen smile and nod a great deal in agreement with the conversation. The bus arrived and took us through town towards home; again I was a little behind Stephen and his colleagues, could see the movement of his lips but was still unable to make out what was being said. The two men had briefcases on their knees, as did Stephen, knees together and ever so proper; he was being very attentive, much more so than he ever was when I talked about my work. One of the men got off the bus and right away the second slipped across to the seat beside Stephen to continue the conversation; if it was finance they were talking about, which I assumed it was, then I never realised it could be such an absorbing topic.

  The bus crawled through heavy traffic and three or four sets of lights and it was almost ten minutes before I could get up from my seat and follow Stephen down the length of the bus; I had to pause a moment behind him, while he said goodbye to his companion, and then we both stepped down onto the pavement.

  ‘What was all that about?’ I demanded, when the bus had pulled away.

  ‘The conversation? We were just talking about work, that’s all,’ Stephen replied, starting to walk along the street.

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ I said, striding along beside him.

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘Why did you warn me away like that, when you saw me outside the office?’

  ‘I was with someone,’ he said, which answered nothing.

  ‘So?’

  ‘I work with those people.’

  ‘And you claim to be in love with me,’ I reminded him. ‘Can’t the two mix?’

  Stephen hesitated long enough for me to see that there was obviously a point, a boundary, beyond which my life could not impinge upon his, and though this worked both ways -by mutual consent or otherwise he was excluded from her art school life- I was somewhat offended by his attitude. His sensible employment, it seemed, was turning him into more of a snob than I could ever be.