A woman, some other student’s mother Tess supposed, stopped to look at her work. ‘This is very – er – vigorous,’ the woman said, craning forward to examine a street-level view of Doddington Road with Maureen looking down from the upstairs window.
‘They’re mainly of the East End,’ Tess replied. ‘Fenfield. I’ve taken quite a loose approach because I want to be accurate to the spirit of the place rather than its surface.’ Each time she delivered this account of her work, she found herself a little less convinced. At worst it sounded like an excuse, she thought, at best like one of Benedict Garvey’s weaker lectures. Once or twice with that in mind she had thrown in the phrase ‘unshackling myself from bourgeois realism’, but only when speaking to a person who appeared receptive to that sort of thing.
‘What about this big one?’ the woman asked.
‘That’s the Choir of the Soviet Red Army, marching past the Albert Hall.’
‘Not the East End, then?’
‘No, that one isn’t in the East End. But see here, watching them go by, that’s the same girl as in the other picture. The one looking out of the window.’
‘I see,’ the woman said, not listening. A charcoal drawing of Tommy the Spade had caught her attention: his weapon raised above his cowering victim. The woman’s face registered distaste.
Tess decided it was time for some mischief. ‘I wasn’t sure whether to show that one,’ she said, with studied caution. ‘And I’m not really supposed to talk about it because it’s what they call sub judice.’ She looked shyly at the floor to bait the hook, then met the woman’s gaze again. ‘The thing is, he actually killed that old man. Smashed his head in.’
‘Good God! Really? With a garden spade? How horrible.’
‘I had to give evidence at the trial. It was terrifying. All the time I was on the stand, he was looking at me with such hatred. Then he started yelling all about how he’d kill me when he got out, and the judge said he had to leave the courtroom. It took four policemen to drag him off.’
The woman looked at Tess in horror, then back at the picture, as if it could add more to the story than it already had. ‘But— They locked him away, surely?’
‘Not yet. Well, he’s in prison, but only on remand. The trial’s still going on. After I gave my testimony, the prosecution barrister told me he’d almost certainly get life, so I should be safe enough. Unless he were to get off for some reason, I suppose, or escape.’
‘You’ve been very brave.’ She put her hand briefly on Tess’s shoulder in a gesture of helpless sympathy. As she did so, however, a look of suspicion crossed her face, as if touching the liar had broken the spell. Tess saw the game was up.
The woman moved on without another word.
Penelope and Marius had arrived. They were talking to Jimmy. Although Tess was too far away from them to hear, she could read the progress of their conversation easily enough. Penelope was impressed by Jimmy’s pictures; Marius, predictably, was not. After Sharpeville 1960, he had expanded his series of twentieth-century massacres to include Chumik Shenko 1904, Amritsar 1919, Shaji 1925, al-Bassa 1938 and Batang Kali 1948. All were perpetrated on anthropomorphic colouring-book animals by other anthropomorphic colouring-book animals. Veronica Wilding loved them. She had offered, once the first-year show was done with, to put the whole set of pictures in her gallery. It was astonishingly good news: selling just a couple could solve all their current financial problems. Still, Tess wasn’t sure it would be good for Jimmy in the long run.
Penelope and Marius detached themselves from Jimmy and came over. It was not a coincidence that her parents chose that moment to terminate their tour of the exhibition and join her too. Visible only to Tess, Jimmy pulled a face behind all their backs. The week-long visit from his new parents-in-law had been difficult.
‘They know I’m queer,’ he’d said to Tess. ‘Even if they don’t realise they know.’
Whether or not that was the reason, they had certainly remained unimpressed by his efforts at charm. Meanwhile, and without even trying, Penelope and Marius had beguiled them.
Jimmy gripped an imaginary rope above his head, let his tongue sag and rolled his eyes. His pretending to hang himself probably oughtn’t to be funny, she thought, given the chance he might try it for real sometime, but she laughed anyway.
‘What’s so amusing?’ Marius said.
‘Oh, that woman over there just caught me out telling her an outrageous lie.’
Her mother gave her a look of disapproval and turned to Penelope. ‘I didn’t know you two were coming today.’
‘Bad Penny, aren’t I? That’s why I keep turning up.’ While Tess’s parents chuckled at that, Penelope took the opportunity to whisper that Delia was outside. Then she exclaimed, ‘Oh, isn’t that Ben Garvey? Excuse me, won’t you. I’ve something I simply must discuss with him.’ With that she was gone.
Tess’s mother scrutinised the picture of Tommy the Spade. ‘You used to do such nice drawings before you came here. Do you think you might go back to that one day?’
‘What did you think of Jimmy’s work?’ Tess said.
Neither her father nor Marius heard the question. Having given quite enough attention to art for one afternoon, they had fallen into conversation about a car one or the other of them was thinking of buying.
‘It’s not the sort of thing I understand,’ her mother said. She scanned the room, obviously bewildered by all of it. ‘I’ve tried my best.’
Tess smiled. ‘I know you have, Mum.’ This was their relationship: bafflement and disappointment. A mother who wished her daughter was more like Penelope and would much prefer her married to someone like Marius. She said, ‘I have to go outside for a while, to speak to a friend. If anyone asks about these, just tell them I’m casting off the shackles of bourgeois realism.’
Outside the college a few minutes later, Tess crossed the road to where Delia stood, and took both her friend’s hands in hers.
‘Penelope told me you were here,’ she said.
‘I don’t think I can go in,’ Delia told her. It wasn’t an apology, just a statement of how things were.
‘Oh, you’ve seen all my stuff anyway. None of it’s good enough.’
Tess meant it. Those paintings weren’t what she’d wanted to exhibit. Right from the start, all the time they’d been arranging the robbery, she had intended to submit the fur hat as her sole exam piece. She’d envisioned it standing on a plinth, inside a box with a window: a sort of ready-made, with a caption saying STOLEN GOODS. It would have failed, naturally. She might even have been arrested. What a conclusion that would have been to this year of surprises, shocks and confusions. To this year of wonders. Instead she’d settled for the practicality of a stolid, invisible B grade.
Did she regret that? As they had all stood together that day, watching the Red Army Choir, it had felt like an ending. Tess had finally done one thing that actually felt like art. Like Art. At the same time, Delia had resolved her debt to Maureen, and the four of them had got away with a crime. Five, counting the foetus inside her. Since that day, the closest she had come to telling anyone what had happened was to make a painting of a marching choir whose meaning only her fellow criminals would ever understand. Now here she was, weeks later, still walking about in the world, a married woman soon to have a child, but also with another year at Moncourt, another chance to become an artist for real.
She was still holding her friend’s hands. She let them go.
‘Do you know what happened to that silly Russian hat in the end?’ she asked.
Delia shook her head. ‘Not a clue. Maybe Maureen’s kept it for the winter. I hear Stella’s out of the shoplifting business now.’
Of course Tess had been right to give it away, to accept the moment for what it was. There were finer things, more beautiful things, than any exhibit. She was fortunate, she realised, and so was Delia. They were lucky to have found each other. It was time to go.
‘I left my mum to explain my paintings,�
� she said. ‘I expect she’s in a terrible panic.’
Delia looked back across the road at the doors to the college. ‘What’s she think about your husband, now she’s finally met him?’
The word struck Tess as odd. It couldn’t encompass what Jimmy meant to her, nor she to him. Yet he was her husband she supposed, factually speaking.
‘They’re getting on as well as I’d have expected,’ she said.
Delia laughed at that. ‘He’s a decent sort. You suit each other, don’t you?’
‘We do. Yes.’
They paused, looking for a way to avoid a big goodbye.
‘I’d better go back in,’ Tess said. ‘The show still has another couple of hours to run.’
‘I’ll head for the Tube, then. Get back to the pub in time for my shift.’
‘You’ll be all right?’
‘I’ve been all right so far.’
On her way to the Tube, Delia walked past Ginelli’s. Tess had mentioned this place a few times, she remembered, so she stopped at the door. It was shut. A handwritten sign in the window read, RE-OPENING SOON UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT. She continued on her way to Euston. There, she descended into the Underground.
Chalk Farm, the closest station to the Enterprise, was two stops away, but Delia was going somewhere else. She’d made her decision after counting to three hundred, before Tess had appeared at the door of the college. The flat in Camden and her job in the pub were no longer what was required.
All her life she had tried to control the uncontrollable. Her Imps had only ever been a name for a lie she told herself; a pretence of order, of rules, when at heart she’d always understood the universe’s messiness. Anyone’s world could be upended at any moment. People fell on metal spikes, were pushed into the paths of speeding cars, had their faces ruined in prison. Delia had been born in the shadow of one world war, and she’d lived through a second. There was plenty of time for another to come along, worse than either of its predecessors. This century was barely more than half-over.
Since leaving Fenfield, she had lived entirely on what she could earn, had never once touched her savings. What was the point of that? Why, for that matter, had she bothered to amass so much money in the first place?
She stood in front of an Underground map mounted on the station wall and traced its bright tracks with her index finger. The Northern Line would take her to King’s Cross, then the Circle Line to Baker Street. Finally, she’d ride the Bakerloo Line to Paddington, where she would empty her locker. She could leave London then, taking nothing with her but her bank books and the clothes she was wearing. Doubtless she’d be back sooner or later; she belonged in this city – but just for now it would be good to see how life was lived elsewhere.
21
Delia exits the Underground at Paddington. On her way out, she nods cheerily to the ticket collector in his wooden booth. He is an older gentleman, studiously polite. The empty left sleeve of his uniform jacket is taped across his chest. She asks him how he is today.
‘Very well, thanks Ma’am,’ he says.
Delia gives him a quizzical look through the window. ‘I often wonder, is your whole job just sitting in this little box all day? It must get quite dull, I suppose.’
He glances behind her. There is no queue at the moment. He has time to talk. ‘We do other things too, Ma’am. Ticket office, platform. They have us on what’s called a rotation. Actually, though, this is my favourite part of it, everything considered. I find people very interesting. You see all sorts passing by.’ He taps his wounded shoulder with his remaining hand. ‘I suppose you wouldn’t call it an exciting life, but I tried excitement during the last war. Can’t say I miss it as much as I do my arm.’
‘Well,’ she says. ‘I’d never have thought of it like that.’
He releases the turnstile, and off she goes. How rare these days, he thinks as the next stream of passengers arrives, for a customer even to notice there’s a person inside the booth.
Half an hour later he will remember little about his encounter with this woman. Her hair might have been blonde he’ll think, or black. Perhaps her age was middle-ish, and her clothes were the normal sort. All he will recall for sure is that she spoke nicely to him as he let her through the turnstile – and being a punctilious man, proud of the care he takes at his work, he would be surprised to hear he never checked her ticket.
HISTORICAL NOTES
This is a work of fiction. I made up almost all of it. There are no such places in real life as Fenfield, the Moncourt Institute or the village of Trencham.
Some elements of the story are based in documented fact. The Thames really did freeze over in January 1963. Several characters mentioned in passing were real. None of them did any of the things I have attributed to them. The Richardsons certainly had connections in South Africa, but the extent to which they were involved in the Broederbond or in the work of the South African Secret Service here in Britain can’t be known with any certainty. The notoriously savage Kray/Richardson turf war actually began in 1965. I have imagined a kind of preparatory rattling of sabres two years earlier than that.
All-women shoplifting gangs did exist in the East End of London, and regularly crossed the city to ply their trade in exclusive establishments such as Barkers of Kensington. Most significantly, the ‘Forty Elephants’ operated with great success from the late nineteenth century until the early 1950s. By the 1960s, however, the Forty Elephants were finished, and as far as I am aware, there was no equivalent of Stella or my fictional crew of hoisters. Later in the decade, the remarkable Shirley Pitts would take on the title ‘Queen of Shoplifters’. Mrs Pitts’ own account of her vivid, unusual life is presented in Gone Shopping: The Story of Shirley Pitts – Queen of Thieves by Lorraine Gamman.
The tone of Tess and Jimmy’s experiences at art school owes a great deal to Vaughan Grills’ entertaining memoir, I Brought This in Case: The 1960s, Four Art Schools and Me, and I collected some further factual details from Art Schools in England 1945 to 1970: An anecdotal history by Hywel James.
Two items held in the British Anti-Apartheid Movement’s archive have been included in the novel. The first page of a flyer advertising the 1963 Trafalgar Square demonstration is quoted verbatim, and the Playwrights Against Apartheid declaration is represented with some small but significant alterations. I should add that I have no idea whether this declaration was really published in the Guardian. Seems likely, though. The archive is held at the Bodleian Library, and its material can be accessed online at https://www.aamarchives.org.
My description of Soho at this time was inspired above all by Wolf Suschitzky’s sublime camerawork in Ken Hughes’ 1963 production The Small World of Sammy Lee, and by Richard Dacre’s documentary tour of that film’s locations, included as an extra on the British Film Institute’s Blu-ray release.
For Jimmy’s brush with the threat of aversion therapy, a profoundly damaging experience that many gay men underwent in this period, I drew on the British Medical Journal article ‘Treatments of homosexuality in Britain since the 1950s – an oral history: the experience of patients’ by Glenn Smith, Annie Bartlett and Michael King.
Other texts from which I have extracted the odd point of reference or inspiration include Alice Diamond and the Forty Elephants: Britain’s First Female Crime Syndicate by Brian McDonald, The Profession of Violence: The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins by John Pearson, and The Last Gangster: My Final Confession by Charlie Richardson.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For permission to use and/or adapt copyright material, I am grateful to the Estate of Allan Kaprow and to the AAM Archives Committee.
Thanks to everyone at Sandstone Press, but especially: Moira Forsyth, Alice Laing (without whom this book would have no title) and my marvellous, judicious and tactful editor, Kay Farrell.
I’ve been a while getting here. For kindness and support along the way, thanks to Jeremy Grant, Emma Matthews, Alan Murray, Dr Jenny Stewart, Ben Suri, Oscar Wharton, Jade Walsh, Dam
ien G Walter, Sheila Dennis, Lisa Eaton, Mahsuda Snaith, Jonathan Taylor.
A special mention for Tim Jones, who has given sage advice on more drafts of more of my fiction than any living human.
Thanks to Harry Whitehead for teaching me how to write novels – anything wrong with this one is still your fault, Harry.
Thanks, and best wishes for the future, to Leicester Vaughan College and everyone there.
Frances Rippin: I doubt I’ll ever pay off my debt to you, but I’ll keep clearing the vig.
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