Finer Things

by David Wharton

  This was almost an exact account of a scene from the TV play, which had been called Girl on the Run, except the girl in question had not ended up in an art school. In fact, things had gone very badly for her. Tess hoped none of the panel had seen it. She doubted these people watched much television.

  ‘Is it wise for a young woman to accept lifts from strangers? From men?’ Mrs Weaver said. ‘Surely your parents must be worried?’

  They certainly would have been. Girl on the Run had terrified them, and her mother now kept referring to ‘what happened in that awful play’ in support of her argument that Tess should choose a college as near to home as possible.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think about that sort of thing,’ she said breezily. ‘The papers all make such a fuss about it to sell copies. I expect it’s very rare really. You just have to be sensible. I mean you’d never experience anything, would you, if you worried all the time about getting murdered? That’s what my mum and dad believe too.’

  ‘Do they now?’ Garvey said. He had stopped looking at the next candidate’s portfolio now, and his manner towards her was different than it had been. Quite by accident, she thought, she might have changed his mind. ‘Anyway, as I say, we’ll be in touch with our decision. Goodbye, Miss Green.’

  As she left, she heard Flint’s porcine voice behind her.

  ‘Ben, that thing about intelligence – holding two different ideas and all that. You know, I’m pretty sure it was Scott Fitzgerald who wrote it.’

  ‘No,’ Garvey replied. ‘It was Brecht. Definitely. In Der Kaukasische Kreidekreis.’

  ‘Well, I suppose you must be right,’ Flint said.

  Jimmy Nichols arrived outside the interview room fifteen minutes before his appointment. There were four chairs in the corridor. Two were occupied by female candidates, quietly keeping their nervousness to themselves. Jimmy took one of the vacant seats. Meanwhile an angular young man in an Aran sweater paced up and down, muttering, ‘I will succeed! I will succeed! I will succeed today!’

  Handsome, Jimmy thought. But unnecessarily intense. He wondered if the angular young man’s idea was to build up his own confidence, to unnerve the competition, or both. In any case he’d soon had enough of it.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘Would you mind not doing that?’

  The young man stopped pacing and gave Jimmy a ferocious look.

  ‘Or perhaps you could go somewhere else and do it, if you really feel you need to,’ Jimmy added. He wondered if he was about to be punched. ‘Only it’s quite off-putting for the rest of us.’

  Letting out an explosion of a sigh, as if he had just been subjected to the most appalling injustice, the young man stalked off around the corner, where his mantra and pacing continued audibly. It seemed to Jimmy he had stepped up the volume on purpose.

  ‘At least we don’t have to watch him anymore,’ he said to the other two. They smiled but did not reply.

  A compact, bohemian-looking young woman came out of the interview room. Through the open door, Jimmy heard someone say something in German. The bohemian dropped her portfolio and sat down heavily in the one vacant chair. With her grey sweater, black canvas trousers and red pumps, she looked exactly like his idea of an art student.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ she said, responding to the smile he had automatically given her.

  ‘Tough, was it?’

  ‘Strange.’

  ‘How do you think you did? If you don’t mind my asking.’

  ‘I don’t mind your asking. But I haven’t a clue. Maybe. Probably not.’ She shook her head. ‘You know it was touch-and-go to start with, but I really think I might have got in.’

  If she was trying to convince herself, he thought, it seemed to be working. Anyway, there was no reason to challenge her about it. ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘Benedict Garvey’s on the panel, isn’t he? He always seems terrifying on those TV programmes. Does the patch put you off?’ He’d heard that during the war Garvey was a bomb-aimer in a Lancaster. Apparently a lump of hot shrapnel had hit him in the face and melted the whole eye away. Tragedy for an artist. For anyone, but for an artist particularly.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that was the most challenging aspect of the interview,’ the bohemian said. Jimmy had lived in Kent all his life, and he liked the unfamiliar music of her northern accent, the air of restrained cleverness that went with it. He was about to ask her where she’d come from when a chubby man in a pinstriped suit leaned out of the door, and scanned the corridor.

  ‘Are you Damian Barratt?’

  ‘No,’ Jimmy began, ‘I think he’s—’ but the angular young man was already striding back towards them.

  ‘That’s me!’ he barked. ‘I’m Damian Barratt!’

  ‘Right ho,’ the pinstriped man said, retreating into the interview room. ‘You’re next then.’

  ‘Best of luck,’ Jimmy said.

  ‘Get stuffed,’ Barratt hissed as he swept by.

  The door closed behind him. After a few moments, the bohemian girl said, ‘He seems very rude. Do you know him?’

  ‘Just met him for the first time.’

  ‘Well, you obviously make a strong first impression – that should work in your favour in there.’

  ‘So – being as you just passed yours – any tips for my interview?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘Just be honest. Be yourself. You’ll be fine.’

  ‘Was that what you did?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Soon after she left, Damian Barratt came out. He leant against the wall and said to nobody in particular, ‘Waste of time that was. Fucked it up completely. ‘Scuse my French, ladies.’ Then to Jimmy, ‘Sorry about before, Chap. Got a bit wound up. Not good at interviews.’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘Decent of you. That Garvey fellow’s an absolute monster. Pulled me to pieces. Christ!’ Barratt took the seat the bohemian girl had vacated and lit a cigarette. Having decided there was nothing he could learn from this buffoon, Jimmy let him smoke in silence.

  Soon afterwards, the pinstriped man arrived to call in one of the young women. Jimmy didn’t hear her name. Barratt shuffled away disconsolately, and two more candidates came along. By then Jimmy had lost interest in talking to anyone. If he didn’t get through this interview, he thought, perhaps he should kill himself.

  As Tess left Moncourt, her belly snarled at her, and she felt suddenly light-headed. The only sustenance she’d taken all morning, she realised, had been a cup of sugary coffee. She decided to return to Ginelli’s. According to the old woman, it was somewhere Moncourt students went, and Tess was more and more certain that she was a Moncourt student now.

  The cafe had grown much busier than before: overfull of animated young people chattering self-importantly. A trio happened to be exiting, so she took one of the seats they had just vacated and deposited her portfolio on another, sandwiching it against the melamine table. The old woman had gone, leaving the dark-haired young man to do triple duty as order-taker, coffee-maker and preparer-of-food. He arrived at Tess’s table with a tray and began to collect up the detritus left by the previous occupants: jam-smeared plates and knives – and three puzzlingly tiny cups, like toys made of thick white porcelain, their interiors stained umber.

  ‘Morning,’ he said. ‘What do you want?’ She had been expecting a heavy foreign accent like the old woman’s, but he spoke like a Londoner. Maybe they weren’t related after all.

  ‘Do you have a menu?’

  He balanced the now-loaded tray on one hand and with the other used a tea towel to wipe away crumbs from the table. It was a deliberately impressive display of minor competence. ‘I can do you toast, eggs, bacon. Cheese on toast. Egg on toast. Mushrooms. We’re out of sausages, and I’m not washing out a scrambled egg pan,’ he said. ‘Fried or poached, that’s the choice. And I’ve got to warn you, if it’s poached I’ll probably end up breaking the yolk. You’ll still have to eat it. Sorry, that’s just the way it is.’

  ‘What are those little cups for?’<
br />
  ‘Espresso. Ain’t you seen that before, then? Really strong coffee it is.’ He leaned down and whispered. ‘All this lot make out they love it, but I tried it once and it’s poison. You never tasted nothing so foul. No fucking wonder they can’t get more’n a thimbleful down.’

  He straightened up again, looking to see if the casual obscenity had startled her, and grinning in the same ugly way he’d done when she first saw him. This time she held his gaze, refusing to be either unnerved or charmed.

  ‘I’ll have an orange juice, please. And a fried egg on toast with mushrooms.’

  His intimacy disappeared. ‘Good choice, Miss. Be about ten minutes.’

  Alone again, Tess wished she could hide behind something to read. She’d left her book at the boarding house, and although she had passed several newsagents on her journey, she hadn’t felt confident about buying the right paper. Some of the people she admired on the foundation course at Leeds read a new magazine called Private Eye. She guessed that would be an appropriately Moncourt-ish point of reference, though whenever she had tried it she got hardly any of the jokes because she didn’t understand current affairs. Try as she might, she couldn’t tell what was important and what wasn’t, or how she was meant to keep up with it all. Or why she should even take any interest in such distant, unchangeable events.

  She looked around her. Everyone here was in a group or a pair, and they were all involved in each other. If she’d brought a pencil and sketchbook she could have set about drawing the clientele. She would have enjoyed capturing these mutually absorbed little groups: the interplay between looks and gestures across tables; the way everyone tried to become whomever it was they wanted others to see; the subtext of every conversation visible in the eyes, the faces; the way they tilted towards or away from each other.

  A young woman entered the cafe. Tess thought her perhaps the most arresting-looking person she had ever seen. She was tall, dressed in a vivid pink angora polo neck and workmen’s blue denim trousers. Beneath a beret of similar blue, her red hair was stringy and unkempt. Her feet were encased in a strange pair of thick-soled black leather boots with yellow stitching. She had applied her make-up like an eighteenth-century French aristocrat: scarlet lipstick and heavy mascara, sharp against white face powder. All that was missing was a cosmetic beauty spot.

  The new arrival stood in the open doorway for a moment, perhaps looking around for some friend she had arranged to meet. Then she caught Tess’s eye and headed in her direction.

  ‘You on your own?’ she said, her accent exactly as upper class as Tess had expected, but her voice surprisingly high-pitched. ‘Mind if I join you?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Tess began, though her new companion was already pulling out the remaining empty chair.

  ‘I’m Penelope Hoxworth. Penny.’

  ‘Theresa Green. Tess.’

  Penny Hoxworth waved to the man behind the counter. ‘Espresso, Luca, when you’ve a minute,’ she called. He looked up from frying Tess’s egg and nodded. Penny indicated Tess’s portfolio. ‘Interview?’

  ‘Yes. This morning at Moncourt Institute.’

  ‘Oh God. Ben Garvey?’

  ‘That’s right. Do you know him?’

  ‘I’m a second year at the Slade. Garvey was there before he got the job at Moncourt. Taught me painting for a term. Did your interview go well?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Really? I wouldn’t have said Ben’s the sort to keep his feelings to himself. Do you know, one time, he described me as “that talentless bulldyker”. Charming, yes?’

  ‘Gosh.’

  ‘I know!’ She leaned back in her chair and framed her face with her hands. ‘Not directly, you understand, not actually to me, but in my hearing. And the thing is, I’m not – a lesbianist, that is. As for talentless – from Ben Garvey. I mean! Did you see his last exhibition?’

  Tess had been wondering whether lesbianist was an actual word, and it took her a moment to realise that Penny had asked her a question.

  ‘His exhibition? Erm. No,’ she said.

  ‘You wouldn’t have. It was a decade ago. In fifty-two. That’s what teaching art does to you. Kills the muse!’ She mimed a pistol shot to her own head. ‘Never try and teach anyone anything, Tessie. It’ll be the end of you as an artist.’

  Luca arrived with the food, Tess’s orange juice and Penny’s espresso. As he handed over the miniature cup, he said, ‘You shouldn’t listen to this woman, Miss. She’s not right in the head.’

  ‘Ignore Luca,’ Penny said. ‘He’s a man-child. Typical Italian male, notwithstanding his second-generation Lundunner persona. His only interests in life are spaghetti and titty milk.’

  First lesbianist, now notwithstanding: a word Tess had never heard anyone say before in actual conversation. And people in this city were so routinely vicious to each other. Penny’s rudeness, however, did not seem to bother Luca at all.

  ‘One and thruppence for the orange juice, toast and egg,’ he said with affected weariness. ‘And half a bob for the espresso.’

  Tess handed over a ten-shilling note.

  ‘Oh, very kind,’ Penny said. ‘Thank you.’

  Luca looked at Tess quizzically. ‘That right, Miss? One and nine?’

  ‘I suppose so, yes.’

  He gave Tess the change and left them. Penny tossed the espresso into her mouth, swallowed and pulled a face. ‘I don’t know if Luca makes these badly or whether the stuff really is just foul,’ she said. ‘Where are you from? I hear an accent. Yorkshire, is it?’

  ‘Dewsbury. Yes.’

  ‘So you’ll be needing somewhere to live, won’t you, when you move down here?’

  ‘If I’ve passed the interview, I suppose I might. But I’m waiting on some other offers too. Lancaster and Canterbury. And Leeds have already told me they’d like to keep me on the diploma course after I finish my foundation.’

  ‘Obviously you’ve passed the interview. You’re clearly very talented. And you can’t possibly choose Canterbury or Leeds – or that other place you said. Of course you’ll go to Moncourt and live in London.’

  Penny produced a notebook from a trouser pocket, tore out a page and gave it to her. There was a number on it. ‘I always keep a few prepared,’ she explained, ‘for emergencies. Look, I’m sharing a house in Camden with three other girls, and one’s moving out at the end of the summer. The rent’s not too bad, and there’s a telephone – incoming calls only, of course. Honestly, none of us are sapphists, despite my lovely boots. Give me a ring when you get your offer.’

  After she exited the cafe, Tess wondered what she would do next. It was almost twelve. On the other side of the city, her mother was going to check out of their boarding house, drop their cases off in the left luggage at Victoria Coach Station, and then go shopping in Oxford Street. To avoid having to join her, Tess had invented an afternoon programme of tours and talks for all the Moncourt hopefuls. Under that pretext, she had intended visiting a gallery on her own, but she found she had gone off the idea now.

  When no better alternative occurred to her, she went to the Tube to ride around the lines. Every year since she’d been eight, she had received a diary for Christmas, always with a schematic map of the London Underground on the back pages.

  ‘Why not put in the Bradford bus timetable instead?’ Dad would invariably complain. ‘That’d be just as much use to most folk.’

  Tess had enjoyed her Tube maps. She loved their thick, brightly coloured lines and, like the teams in the football results on the radio, the names of the London stations had a soothing, mysterious poetry, especially when she said them aloud. Chalk Farm, Maida Vale, Chiswick Park, Clapham Common, Barons Court, Elephant and Castle.

  By now it was the middle of the afternoon, and the Underground was stuffed with tourists. Her bulky portfolio was even more of a nuisance down here, getting in people’s way and making it difficult to negotiate the narrow tunnels between platforms. She decided to get out at Blackfriars, a name that
for her had always conjured a gothic cathedral out of Poe, attended by sinister, silent monks.

  Of course the place was not at all as she had pictured it. Just a jumble of mouldy Victorian red brick, ancient stone and bare new concrete, and the thick, sluggish river, stinking of sewage. She sat on a bench by its banks and decided that if Moncourt offered her a place she would accept. And Moncourt would offer her a place, she was sure of that.

  Penny’s number, which Tess had slipped into the top of her portfolio after their encounter, was her one proper connection with the city that would be her home in a few months’ time. She untied the boards and looked for the scrap of paper. Here it was, tucked among all her old pictures.

  Seeing her work unexpectedly like this, in the context of thinking about something else, she was struck by how impressive so much of it was. How beautifully done. She had been correct to feel proud of these pieces, and Garvey had no right to dismiss them. She lifted up the first three in the stack and stood them against the bench, then stepped back for a proper look.

  The one of her sister that Mrs Weaver had admired really was very good, she thought. You could see Sally’s petulance and vulnerability in it. The other two satisfied her less – but they were only quick studies, sketches of people she’d seen on the bus from Dewsbury to Leeds, refined a little in the studio at college. An old man and a schoolboy. Looking at them now, she wasn’t sure why she had even included them in the portfolio.

  A female voice behind her said, ‘How much?’

  She turned. A couple stood on the riverside path, arm in arm. A man and a woman, middle-aged. The woman who had spoken to her wore a red headscarf and polka dot dress, the man a trilby and blazer with sharply pressed trousers and tieless shirt.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Tess said.

  ‘How much are the pictures?’ the woman repeated.

  ‘Oh,’ Tess began, ‘these aren’t— that is, which one?’

  ‘How about the old fellow in the flat cap? I rather like the look in his eye.’