‘I have,’ Tess replied. ‘It’s all right. Not well written, though, and quite self-regarding. Reminded me of bad poetry sometimes. I don’t think he always has any idea himself what he means. It gets better in the second half.’
Penny said, ‘I wouldn’t read anything by that man. You know he once called me—’ She took a drink, and waited for Tess, who had obviously heard this story before, to complete the sentence for her.
‘—that talentless bulldyker!’
‘Quite. Men like Garvey need to learn: a woman in trousers isn’t necessarily a lesbianist. Not that I have any objection to homosexuals of either persuasion, you understand.’
She threw Jimmy a sly glance, and he wondered how it was that so many people could see so easily? He wasn’t camp or obvious, as far as he could tell, but there was at least some usefulness to being identifiably queer. Since coming to London, he had already discovered what it could facilitate for him in a swimming-pool changing room or public toilet. But when the likes of Penny Hoxworth made it known she’d spotted what he was, he felt his privacy invaded.
‘So,’ he said, looking for revenge. ‘What about the “talentless” part?’
Penny blew him a kiss across the table. ‘Touché. Not for me to judge that one. Don’t much care, either.’
For that remark, he thought, she was due some respect at least.
A chunky young man at the noisy next-door table turned to speak to them. He wasn’t bad looking in a dull-faced way, Jimmy decided, despite a prematurely receding hairline that added ten years to his age.
‘You lot are first years at Moncourt, aren’t you?’
‘They are,’ Penny told him. ‘I’m not.’
‘Not a first year?’
‘Not at Moncourt either.’
He regarded her with interest. ‘That explains why I’ve not seen you in here before. I’m doing Business and Accounts at the Laughton Institute. My name’s Marius Shearsby by the way.’
He was still addressing himself entirely to Penny. Jimmy did his trick of raising a single eyebrow and was pleased when Tess had to cover her mouth to suppress her laughter.
Shearsby glanced distrustfully between Jimmy and Tess, then returned his attention to Penny. ‘Anyway, there’s going to be an impromptu later, in Primrose Hill, if you and your chums want to come.’
‘We’ll think about it,’ Penny said, in the manner of someone who had no intention of doing so. Nevertheless, it was with a look of accomplishment that Marius Shearsby turned back to his companions, one of whom immediately leant across to whisper something in his ear.
‘Mission complete, Marius,’ Jimmy said to Tess and Penny. ‘I don’t know about you two, but I’m not going anywhere with a bloke who talks about impromptus and chums.’
Despite which, when the pub closed, Jimmy found himself carried along with the tide of students and staff all heading for the Primrose Hill party. Hours later here he still was, in a house that could have swallowed his father’s terraced cottage three times over. Apparently it belonged to a couple of postgraduate students, or rather to one of their parents. Right now, Marius Shearsby was droning away to him about this ‘investment’, glancing around himself all the time, looking for Penny, Jimmy supposed. No point in that.
Half an hour previously, Toby Flint, the piggy-faced head of sculpture had started dancing drunkenly to someone’s American jazz records. That was when Tess had suggested it was time to go, and Penny had agreed. Marius, hooting with laughter as Toby fell on his pinstriped backside, hadn’t noticed their exit. Jimmy knew now he should have joined them in their taxi. Apparently they lived near the house in Camden where he rented a room. But at the time he’d been engaged in conversation with an interesting-looking second year from graphic design. Now the graphic designer was elsewhere, Flint was snoring on a Chesterfield sofa, and Jimmy was trapped with Marius Shearsby.
‘What do your people do?’ Marius asked him.
‘My people? You mean my mum and dad? He’s a coal miner. She used to work in a shoe factory, but she died last year.’
Soon after that, Marius invented an excuse to wander off, and Jimmy decided to try and find the graphic designer again. Passing by the unconscious Toby Flint, he saw that a trail of drool had leaked out of the corner of the tutor’s mouth and almost filled one of the sofa’s buttons to the top. It seemed bizarre to him that any of the Moncourt staff would come to a thing like this. Awkwardly conscious as they all obviously were of their off-duty status, it couldn’t be much fun for them. What on earth did they get out of it? Then again, it wasn’t much fun for Jimmy either, and yet here he was, prowling around the house in search of a probably heterosexual young man.
In the kitchen, he discovered a cluster of marijuana smokers. Finding the aroma of the drug pleasant, he stayed, leaning against the cooker. The lights were low, and it took his eyes a while to adjust after the brightness of the hallway, but he made out a couple of familiar faces. The joint, he saw, was currently with Roger Dunbar. Roger was the tutor in charge of first-year painting, a well-maintained fifty-year-old, sloppily but nattily dressed, with a mop of greying hair and an untidy, matching beard. He was the kind of man who’d been unremarkable when younger, grown briefly more attractive with age, and was now on the cusp of a decline. Jimmy wondered if he found that sort of thing attractive – an idle question, since the tutor was married with several kids and notorious for his pursuit of female students.
Next to Roger, to Jimmy’s unsurprised disappointment, the attractive graphic designer was busy kissing some young woman and trying to thwart her half-hearted efforts to keep his hands off her breasts.
Roger offered the joint to Jimmy.
‘No thanks,’ he said. ‘I don’t have the constitution for it. Tried it once when I was fifteen and I nearly passed out.’
‘Oh, that happens to everyone first time, Nichols. Give it a try. It frees the imagination.’
Roger stood up to give Jimmy the joint. He took it and drew deeply, burning his throat and lungs. His brain shrank inside his skull. A vignette closed in around the edges of his vision. His mouth filled with saliva and the contents of his stomach began to rise. In a panic, he shoved the joint back into Roger’s hand and raced for the sink, reaching it just in time for his body to release a ferocious jet of vomit. It was mostly beer. Afterwards he ran the tap to wash it away, and poured himself a glass of water.
Several of the marijuana smokers, including the graphic designer, were giggling.
‘Sorry about that.’ Roger passed the joint to one of the others, then opened the door onto the rear garden. ‘Let’s get you some fresh air.’ Then there was a hand against the small of Jimmy’s back, guiding him almost without pressure into the welcome cool of the night.
FEBRUARY – MARCH 1963
6
Penny lay on Tess’s bed, reading her tattered Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a pirate copy from before the end of the ban. She’d been out in the snow to the greengrocer’s and was working her way through a bag of satsumas. Meanwhile, a few squiggles of muddy ice had fallen from the treads of her German boots onto the bedcovers.
Tess sat at the desk, trying to type up an essay about Allan Kaprow for an optional course she was taking in contemporary artists. The dirt on her bed and the satsuma peelings on her floor were among several Penny-related irritations about which she was currently keeping her feelings to herself. The Imperial Model B typewriter was another. A month ago, browsing a local second-hand shop, Tess had been drawn to a little green plastic Olivetti, marked barely used, but Penny had managed to persuade her that the peculiar and ancient Imperial represented the more stylish investment.
Aesthetically, she was right. The Model B was a skeletal, black and sepia construction in wood and iron. Made before the First World War, it seemed to Tess more like some half-cannibalised device from a destroyed future. As an artwork, it fascinated her. As a typewriter, its main drawback was that it didn’t work. The carriage return would triple-space of its own accor
d, the caps lock liked to disengage itself, and the ‘m’ key stuck. None of these quirks occurred consistently. Tess sometimes wondered if she might find a way to avoid the machine’s idiosyncrasies by choosing her words cautiously to avoid particular sequences of letters, but there seemed no discernible pattern to the Model B’s misbehaviour.
‘Do you want to go somewhere interesting this Thursday night?’ Penny said, just as the word ‘immediately’ jammed eight type-hammers into a clump against the ribbon. Wearily, Tess set about untangling them.
‘Where?’
Penny dropped her Lady Chatterley among the satsuma peelings on the floor and sat up, depositing a few more of her boots’ frozen runes on Tess’s bed. ‘Soho. There’s a club. Marius can get a few of us in, he thinks.’
‘I’ve got to finish my essay for Monday.’
The hammers all dropped back into their home positions. Tess cleaned the ink from her fingers with the damp cloth she kept on her desk. She typed another sentence, two-fingered, looking at the keyboard, but fast and accurate. If she could keep writing, she thought, the ideas behind Kaprow’s work might begin to make sense to her.
Many commentators find it difficult to accept the
notion that an artwork can be a scripted event, an idea
rather than an artefact. It could be argued, moreover,
that Kaprow’s soi-disant ’happenings’
Too pretentious, she decided.
It could be argued, moreover, that Kaprow’s
soi-disant ‘happenings’ It could be argued that
Kaprow’s so-called happenings have more in common
with theatrical performances than they do with a
painting or a sculpture. However, there are some
interes
‘Francis Bacon goes sometimes, I’ve heard. Allen Jones too.’ Clearly Penny wasn’t going to let Tess concentrate until she agreed.
‘How can Mr Business and Accounts get us into a club with Francis Bacon and Allen Jones? Hardly sounds like his sort of thing, does it?’
‘Well, I’m not promising they’ll both be there.’
‘Why do you encourage that awful bloke anyway?’
She knew the answer. Penny selected and maintained her friends entirely on the grounds of usefulness and convenience. Marius’s social connections, along with his romantic obsession with Penny, made him useful. Tess on the other hand did not flatter herself she was anything more than convenient; someone reasonably interesting to talk to. The other tenants in the house were both secretaries in the same typing pool. They worked long hours and their sole interest was in swapping mundane anecdotes about their colleagues and bosses.
‘Marius’s father’s some kind of novelist, or playwright, or poet. Used to be an Angry Young Man. Now he’s an irritable middle-aged man. That’s what Marius says. Anyway, whatever he does, he’s well-known for it and that gets him in. He’ll recommend us, and that’ll get us in.’
‘Why would he do that? He has no idea who we are.’
‘Paternal indulgence, darling. We’re Marius’s friends. That’s enough for Daddy. You can bring the passionate young Mellors too, if you like.’
Penny delighted in every opportunity she could find to promote the absurd notion that Tess’s and Jimmy’s friendship barely concealed their seething lust. There was something else in the way she talked about him too, some not-too-subtle subtext Tess could hear, but couldn’t get at.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘If Jimmy wants to go, I will too. But that means I really do need to finish my essay now.’
‘Don’t mind me. I shall return to my study of literature.’ Penny grimaced as she retrieved her Lady Chatterley. ‘Though I have to say, I wouldn’t have believed it possible to write this unsexily about fucking.’
Jimmy had a contact at the medical school through whom he had acquired thirteen human skulls.
‘They’re real ones,’ he’d announced the first time he’d opened the sack to show them to Tess. ‘Not plaster or anything. These are actual skulls out of actual people’s heads. Thirteen people. Imagine that.’
At first, seeing the skulls all jumbled in a sack like murderers’ trophies, she had found them hideous. Their jawbones reattached with wire. The hollow craniums with their hairline cracks. All the chips and scars – damage that might have happened before death or after. Now that Jimmy had assembled them into a pyramid, they were easier to look at. Five skulls formed the base, four the next layer, three the next, and one sat on top. He had arranged them so that their faces all pointed away from him.
As usual on Monday morning, their tutor Roger Dunbar had not yet arrived. Two dozen first-year fine art students were scattered around the studio: some in groups of three or four, many in pairs, and one or two in isolation. Each was equipped with an easel and a small table. Unlike every other class at Moncourt, Tess’s year were not allowed their own permanent working spaces.
‘If you stay in one place, your imagination and your eye stagnate,’ Roger had explained. ‘Far better to start everything fresh each morning. Your mistakes won’t hinder you, and your successes won’t turn into mannerisms. So every night we’ll clear the room, and every morning you’ll choose a new spot.’
He never seemed to notice, however, that each morning they all returned their equipment to more or less exactly the same positions. You couldn’t fight human nature, Tess supposed. She and Jimmy liked it here, towards the back of the room. Jimmy had even cut his initials into a table and easel, to ensure he could always retrieve the same ones: his kit.
Their current task was to ‘find and paint an object of symbolic value, so as to explore the idea of meaning in visual art’. In response, about a quarter of the class had brought in musical instruments, which they were approaching in various conventional ways – here a straightforward still life, there a Picasso-esque collage – all of which struck Tess as avoiding the challenge. Others had found crassly meaningful subjects: political books, bits of army uniform, religious insignia.
Tess was painting a scruffy old toy bear. Jimmy was depicting his pile of skulls in oils, with crude strokes of harsh colour.
‘I’ve seen one a bit like this by Cezanne,’ Tess said.
‘I know it. Fewer skulls, facing the painter.’ Jimmy sounded like a bad ventriloquist. He had a paintbrush gripped between his teeth, the way a dog in a cartoon might carry a bone.
‘So why are you painting the backs of their heads?’
‘More interesting.’
He put down the brush he’d been painting with, removed the other from his mouth and used it as a pointer to emphasise his explanation. ‘When the eyeholes are staring at you, they’re all the same. But this way round – look at the variation – texture, shape, colour. The back of the head, that’s where the real individuality is.’
‘But you aren’t painting the subtleties, are you?’
‘Aren’t I?’ Jimmy shut his left eye to suggest a patch, and mimicked Benedict Garvey’s punctilious, oddly emphasised delivery, familiar from their weekly art history and theory lectures. ‘Yes, by painting the backs of these skulls, I seek to reveal a delicate individuality, which would otherwise be overwhelmed by the obvious and clichéd memento mori symbolism of the forward-facing death’s head. Do you mean to suggest, Miss Green, therefore, that this somewhat naive rendition I’m making here might be at odds with those lofty intentions?’
It was an old game between them by now. His perfect impersonation only required a standard response from her.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And no.’
‘Yes indeed. And, of course, no.’ He stepped back and admired his own painting. Dropped back into himself again. ‘I’m pleased with it. It looks good, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes – but I can’t say why.’
It was odd. Neither Jimmy’s patience nor his technique was up to much, really, and this picture was typical, with its apparently shoddy draughtsmanship and a composition that ought by conventional standards to be weak. Yet it succeed
ed because of qualities so indefinable that you had to fall back on vague ideas like ‘painterly’ to explain them.
‘Yours is great, Tess,’ he said. ‘I wish I could just get things like you do. The fur . . .?it’s so believable. And there’s a mood about it too.’
He was just being kind. She knew her technical perfection served only to emphasise what the painting lacked, and Jimmy’s had, which was Art. It was fun to sneer at Garvey, but ever since starting the course, she had become increasingly convinced that the man had been right about her, that what he had seen within a second of opening her portfolio was true. Unless she could find a way to become a different kind of artist, she might as well give up: leave Moncourt and get herself a job drawing surgical enhancements for newspaper ads.
The class had been working on their paintings for an hour and a half when Roger Dunbar finally entered the studio. Poor punctuality was one of many liberties the tutor denied his students but allowed himself.
‘You know he’s been to bed with three of these girls since the Christmas holiday,’ Jimmy murmured.
On the far side of the room, Dunbar leaned in close to a female student and guided her brush hand to indicate where work needed to be done.
‘No – who?’
‘Jill, Olivia, Zoe.’ When Tess did not reply immediately, Jimmy added, ‘Not all at once – obviously.’
After a moment’s reflection, she said, ‘At least an orgy would be dramatic. Working his way through the first-year girls one by one is just unambitious.’
‘You shouldn’t try so hard to sound like Penny, you know. She’s not worth half of you.’
After that they both focused on their paintings for a couple of minutes. Tess was cross at him because he was right. Penny’s style of showy glibness would only impress the sort of people whose good opinion was worthless. Still, he didn’t need to be so nasty about it.
He had been adding highlights in yellow. Now he dipped his brush in the jar of turpentine, dried it on a rag and loaded it with burnt umber mixed with a little purple. This he began applying carefully to the spaces between the skulls. Tess saw how the deep shadows would transform the picture. They would define and separate each skull from the others, reveal its individuality.
Finer Things Page 8