‘Do you want to know something else about Roger Dunbar?’ Jimmy murmured. ‘A proper secret?’
‘What’s that?’ she said, because in own his way he was apologising, and to reject the offer would be petulant, though really she’d have preferred to abandon the subject entirely.
‘Later.’ He gave a tilt of his head to indicate that the tutor had made his way to their part of the room and was within earshot.
Roger strolled from canvas to canvas, finding some remark to make about each student’s work. When he reached Jimmy’s painting, he just paused long enough to say, ‘Rough, but strong,’ before he moved on to Tess’s canvas. ‘Beautifully done, as always. And you’ve avoided the risk of tweeness. Is the bear your own?’
‘From when I was little,’ she replied, though actually she had found this bear only a week ago, rain-soaked, on the street, taken it home and dried it out on a windowsill. She glanced at Jimmy, looking for support, but he was determinedly focused on his own work.
‘What does it mean?’ Roger asked.
‘My grandmother gave it to me,’ she said. ‘I forgot I had it. Then when I was eight, my little sister found it and started playing with it. Of course, I immediately wanted it back, and we ended up in a massive argument. So my mum said she’d throw it on the fire if we couldn’t agree who it belonged to.’
‘Like King Solomon and the baby,’ Roger said.
‘That’s what I thought. And knowing that story, I knew what to do. I said I couldn’t stand to see the bear burned, and Sally could have it. But then it turned out Mum didn’t know the story of Solomon at all. She just gave the bear to my sister. After a couple of days Sally lost interest, so I went in her room and took it back. She didn’t even notice.’
‘I see.’ He hovered around the inevitable question before landing on it. ‘And how does this picture communicate that meaning?’
‘It doesn’t,’ Tess said immediately. ‘I’m not all that happy with it, if you want to know.’
He moved nearer. She did her best not to flinch or stiffen at the dry warmth of his palm around the back of her brush hand.
‘Here,’ he said softly, as he made her draw hieroglyphs in the air. ‘The problem is, you’ve only painted what you see. It looks like a toy bear.’
Close up, she saw signs that Roger was beginning to unravel. His skin was drab. There was tobacco on his breath, and the sour odour of last night’s drinking. She slipped her hand free of his.
‘What should it look like, then, Mr Dunbar?’
‘Think about a real bear,’ he said. ‘A real bear wouldn’t comfort a little girl, it would kill and eat her. So why do we feel the need to transform this savage creature into something so safe? And how does all that fit with you and your sister? You can’t answer those questions, so you mustn’t try. But if you get the picture to ask them, maybe it’ll mean something.’
‘I don’t know how to do that,’ Tess said.
Roger looked back at her evenly. ‘Give it a try.’
He moved on. Tess stepped back from her painting, and wondered what to do. She was in her second term at one of the so-called best schools in the country, and so far all she had learnt was that art wasn’t fair. You spent hours and hours trying to paint what things were, only to find yourself falling short of painting what they meant. Dunbar was no help. It sounded meaningful when he talked, but underneath his pose of wisdom her tutor could barely express what he was looking for. As far as she could see, that made him typical around here.
Once Roger had worked his way all around the room, he called for everyone’s attention.
‘There’s good stuff here,’ he told them all. ‘Some better than others, of course, but generally, yes, rather impressive. Well done.’ He paused, created a sense that what he was about to say next would be momentous. ‘Now, as you all know, once you’ve all done your final pieces in a few months, there’s the first-year show for the examiners. Normally that’s a quiet affair, not open to the public like the third-year show. But you’ll be aware that I recently took over as head of the first-year course, and I’ve seen some real potential in this group. So I’m pleased to announce that for the first time ever, your examining panel this summer will include an important art dealer.’
Olivia Rackham put up her hand, and without waiting for acknowledgement asked, ‘Which dealer is this, Roger?’
Remembering that Jimmy had named Olivia as one of the girls Roger had been to bed with, Tess caught her friend’s eye. He grinned back at her and nodded.
‘I can’t tell you that right now,’ Roger said, ‘but I can say she’s influential.’ He hesitated, realising the pronoun had narrowed the field. ‘It’s not likely this dealer will buy anything, of course, but it’s an excellent opportunity for each of you to make an impression. I hope you’ll all take best advantage of it.’
There was a murmur of excitement around the room. Tess didn’t care. She had already concluded that passing the first-year exam and surviving into the second year would be enough for her. Looking around at her peers, she thought most of them really ought to be feeling the same way.
Roger put a finger to his lips. ‘Listen, I can’t tell you anything about how the viewings will be arranged – it’s all behind closed doors. However, what I can say is that my recommendations are respected. And good work is good work. It’s not a matter of opinion.’
Tess returned to her painting, and realised the story she had just told Roger was not after all a complete lie. Now she thought of it, she was fairly sure there had been a real childhood dispute rather like the one she had described, though it was over a doll rather than a bear.
Her mother really had threatened to resolve the argument by chucking the thing in the fire, but there the similarity to the Solomon story ended. As Tess recalled, neither she nor Sally would give in, leaving Mum no choice. Once the toy began crackling irretrievably in the flames, Sally did at last turn despondent, and begged, too late, for its salvation. Tess, however, rather enjoyed seeing it melt and burn. In the circumstances, destruction had felt like the only possible victory.
Had all that really happened, though? The recollection flickered irritatingly in her mind. It might have been a dream, or something she had invented.
She resolved to ask about it when her mother telephoned at the weekend.
‘Can’t face all that suet,’ Jimmy said as they left the studio at lunchtime. On Mondays, the refectory always served meat pudding followed by spotted dick. ‘Want to walk to Ginelli’s for lunch? I could do with some fresh air.’
Tess had hoped to enjoy an hour in the refectory’s comfortable fug, but instead found herself trudging alongside Jimmy through the harsh February cold. For almost two months, snow had fallen over the city. Its obviating whiteness seemed strange and symbolic at first, a marker of all the newness in her life, until time turned it into an uncomfortable bore to be endured as long as it lasted. Even kids had stopped bothering with snowballs after a couple of weeks.
Last Saturday, while taking a walk along the banks of the Thames, she’d witnessed a car pulling a skier along the river’s frozen surface. The surrealism of the scene had barely occurred to her.
She struggled to keep her footing on the compacted ice and tried her best not to be bad tempered about it.
‘What do you think about this dealer looking at our work?’ she asked Jimmy. ‘I don’t see much point in it myself.’
‘Ah, but you’re forgetting Roger’s behind-the-scenes influence.’
Tess laughed. ‘Poor Roger. He really wants to be important, doesn’t he?’
‘He’s a shit,’ Jimmy said. ‘Have you noticed he never uses anyone’s name? Students, I mean. I don’t think he knows what any of us are called. Not even the girls he’s fucked. That’s pretty unforgivable, don’t you think?’
It had not taken Tess long to grow accustomed to the well-spoken vulgarity affected by most of her middle-class contemporaries at Moncourt, but she knew Jimmy preferred to keep his swearing fo
r the times he really felt he needed it.
‘What were you going to tell me before?’ she asked him. ‘You mentioned you knew a proper secret.’
‘Oh. That. I probably shouldn’t say.’ He picked up pace. ‘We’d better get a move on, hadn’t we? We’ve been dawdling. At this rate we’ll barely have time for a snack.’
Tess decided she’d already let him push her around enough for one day. She stopped walking. He took a couple of steps further and then halted too.
‘Just tell me,’ she said.
He sighed. ‘All right. But we have to keep going. Come on.’
They set off again.
‘So?’
He stuck his hands in his coat pockets. ‘The thing is, when it comes to sex, Roger isn’t only interested in females.’
At first, she thought she understood what Jimmy meant. But so what if Roger Dunbar was bisexual. Surely, after all the art history she’d studied, Jimmy hadn’t expected her to be shocked by that?
‘I have to say, that’s hardly—’ she began. Then she realised. ‘Oh Christ, Jimmy.’
They walked a few more steps in silence. She was going to have to hear all about this, she supposed, however uncomfortable she felt about it. He needed a confidante, was waiting for her to take that role. There was no way out.
‘So how—I mean—when—?’
He kept his eyes focused on the road ahead and continued in a determined monotone. ‘Right at the start. Do you remember that awful party Marius Shearsby dragged us to in Primrose Hill? It was after you went home. I got in a bit of a state, I’m afraid. Roger was sympathetic. We went out into the garden where it was dark and there were trees we could hide behind. Anyway, everyone else was in the house. Once we were finished, he told me to wait out there for twenty minutes after he’d gone in, so nobody would guess what shenanigans we’d been up to. That really was what he called it – shenanigans. I should have known then how he’d be afterwards. By the time I went back into the house, he’d left.’
‘He could go to jail,’ Tess said.
‘We both could.’
‘You’d be his victim,’ she said. ‘You’re under twenty-one.’ She wasn’t entirely sure of the law, but she’d read reports about this type of thing in her father’s News of the World.
‘Except it wasn’t my first time, Tess.’
‘Oh.’
‘Hadn’t you guessed?’ Jimmy said. ‘I mean, you’ve never thought of me as a possible boyfriend, have you?’
That was true. He was just her friend. But then, Tess seldom thought romantically about any actual person. Her fantasy objects always lay somewhere in the future, were more abstractions than people: just stories she told herself.
‘You don’t look like one,’ she said. ‘Or sound like one.’
He grunted in response. Perhaps she’d offended him, she thought. All she had meant was that he didn’t speak in one of those voices she sometimes heard in radio comedies, full of archness and italics. Everyone knew that way of talking was code for ‘queer’, though nobody ever said so. She’d met young men whose manner was like that – not so exaggerated, perhaps, but definitely in the same category. It occurred to her now that maybe it wasn’t exactly natural to them; maybe they chose to speak that way on purpose, to tell the world what they were. If so, she thought, that was a tremendously brave thing to do.
‘I’m just saying you just don’t seem like an obvious homosexual to me. Nor does Roger.’
‘Plenty of poofs don’t flounce around yammering in Polari,’ he said. ‘But a lot of people do spot it in me, you know. Penny saw it right off, for example.’
Of course. That was the real joke, the now-totally obvious subtext, underlying all Penny’s ribbing about ‘Tess’s little beau’. Thinking of that, she blushed at her own stupidity.
‘As for Roger,’ Jimmy continued, ‘he isn’t really a homo. He just dabbles once in a while. I suppose all those compliant nineteen-year-old girls must get dull for him. Still, after he’s been with a boy – I mean, immediately after – he does find it necessary to provide a list of all the women he’s had sex with. That’s how I know about those three in our year. Because Roger’s not a degenerate, you see.’
‘Is that why you’re angry at him? Because he’s—’ she scrambled about for the right word ‘—uncommitted?’
‘It annoys me that he won’t talk properly to me about my work anymore, that’s all. He’s being such a child about it. But I suppose that’s my own stupid fault for getting in the situation in the first place. And you could be right – about him being frightened of jail.’
‘Or of losing his position at least.’
‘As far as that goes, I think they’re allowed as much fun as they want with the students, Tess. It’s not just a perk – most of them think it’s part of the job. Sentimental education, they call it. You know about Joe Reid, don’t you?’
Reid taught in the sculpture department. According to gossip, he’d got a student pregnant last year, or possibly the year before, and the girl had died during a botched backstreet abortion. Or anyway she had got so ill she hadn’t been able to stay on the course. Despite this travesty, the story went, there had been no sanctions whatsoever for Reid. There might have been some truth in part of it, Tess thought, but surely there was a lot of hyperbole too.
‘That’s just rumours,’ she said, perhaps a bit too primly.
‘No smoke without fire,’ Jimmy replied, as if that settled the matter. She let it go.
They arrived at Ginelli’s, and found themselves alone there, apart from Luca and his mother, bickering in Italian behind the counter.
‘Looks like this place got unfashionable without our noticing,’ Jimmy remarked as they took their seats.
‘Good,’ Tess said.
7
As long as she kept herself reasonably sober, Delia was allowed whatever she wanted from the bar. It turned out she didn’t really want anything. She sat alone, not touching her tonic water, taking a break for now. In half an hour or so, she’d have to be sociable again, earn her keep for the evening. She’d need alcohol then.
It was nine forty-five, and the Gaudi was half-full – which was as full as it ever got. At scattered tables around the tiny club, self-involved customers chattered over the equally self-involved musical accompaniment provided by the Les Jensen Jazz Trio, playing on the tiny stage at the side. When she’d first come here, Delia had found the clientele strange and glamorous: men in black sweaters or checked shirts; women in blue jeans and dramatic spectacle frames. But she had soon realised that the appearance of being interesting was about as much as most of these people could manage.
At a table near the stage, Rita and Kathy, the other two of Stella’s girls here tonight, were noisily entertaining a group of actors. From time to time, Les Jensen scowled down from his piano in disapproval at this disrespectful racket.
Delia liked rock and roll best, and she didn’t mind some jazz – Kenny Ball or Acker Bilk – the stompy, old-fashioned sort you heard on the wireless sometimes. But the Les Jensen Trio sounded nothing like that. Their music was flashy, abstract and syncopated. Delia’s untrained ear could find nothing in it resembling a melody or a rhythm. There were no songs, no breaks in the performance, just a long, vague improvisation in which no note lasted long enough to sound completely wrong. Occasionally, the group would slip, probably by accident, into something recognisable as music, but after a bar or two, they would spot their mistake and return to tuneless virtuosity. Every fifteen minutes one member took a solo (always following the same strict cycle: piano–drums–bass) during which the other two could leave the stage for a break. Thus they were able to play on relentlessly all night.
Bill Shearsby arrived at her table during the night’s fourth bass solo. By way of greeting, he mimed along on an imaginary instrument.
‘Dum-dum-du-dum-du-dumdum-dum-du-dum. Can I join you?’
She could have told him she wanted to be on her own. He’d have understood, wouldn’t h
ave taken it personally. But she liked Shearsby. He was also one of the half-dozen customers Finlay especially wanted the hoisters to talk with. What for, she wasn’t sure. He didn’t seem well-off enough to be a candidate for blackmail, and there was nothing obviously crooked about him. She smiled and nodded, and he took the seat opposite her.
‘Ah well, at least there’s no bloody poet this time,’ he said.
One night a couple of weeks previously, the Les Jensen Trio’s performance had been augmented by a bearded Australian ranting semi-comprehensibly about sex and politics. Some of it had been hilarious, but Delia had not known if she was allowed to laugh.
‘You writing anything at the minute, Bill?’ she asked. ‘It’s plays you do, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, let’s not talk about that, Delia.’
She knew he didn’t mean it. ‘What are they about, then? Your plays.’
‘All sorts. It depends.’
‘Ain’t you got a main subject, though? Something you keep coming back to, no matter what the story is?’
‘You mean my theme? For a shoplifter, you make a fair literary critic, Delia.’
Shearsby was a heavily built bloke, in his middle forties she’d guess, with some kind of country accent. He said sharp-liffur for shoplifter and lurtery for literary.
‘I ain’t a shoplifter, Bill. I don’t know where you got that idea.’
‘Course not. Just my imagination running away with me, I expect.’
‘Well, I like reading. Always have,’ she told him. ‘Charles Dickens. He’s got a theme, ain’t he? Always writing about lost kids.’
‘Like Oliver Twist? You read that one, Delia?’
‘Started once or twice. Never got away with it.’
He grinned. ‘Bit too close to home, maybe?’
‘I seen the musical. New Theatre about three year ago. Gent I was walking out with at the time took me. Proper cultural, he was. We went to quite a few plays together. Not just musicals, neither. Harold Pinter, John Osborne, Rattigan. Any of your plays been on up the West End, Bill?’ She realised she had slipped into playing up her accent – as if she was some character out of Oliver herself. Or Eliza bloody Doolittle.
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