‘No they don’t, you’ve got it all wrong …’
‘I have not. Will you listen to me, for God’s sake? I can’t draw, nobody likes my work, I’ve no ideas, I bore everyone, I even bore myself. I’ve nothing to live for, I’ve never fallen in love and I’m nearly twenty, and I want to die.’ At last he relaxed his damp grip and she pulled her hand away with relief.
‘But I love you, Bianca.’
‘Oh, God.’ She rolled her eyes and for an instant felt as if this minor motion would overbalance her. Drink was not a factor; she hated the taste of beer and had struggled through the minimum quantity necessary to participate in the evening. Unhappiness had sapped all her energy. She felt exhausted. For support she leaned against the wall and regarded the man who taught screenprinting. With his wild brown hair hanging over his low eyebrows, he was preparing to move towards her.
‘I do, I love you, Bianca.’
‘I want to go home.’
He paused, shaking his head slowly like an ox choosing between two gates. ‘This is your home, isn’t it?’
‘Oh God, yes, it is.’ That was her weeping fig tree behind him, and she was the person who had started to paint the opposite wall pink last weekend and stopped because it had not come out the right colour. She could smell her sister’s joss sticks from the next room. Above her head she could hear her mother, or her father, or maybe her mother’s lover, or any combination of these – who cared? – clattering around on the varnished floorboards.
She had a memory of a voice in another party an hour or so ago, gaily inviting everyone home for coffee. Hermione, her sister, had already collected five friends who had been sitting at the square pine table with a large lump of dope and its attendant paraphernalia scattered around them when the rest arrived. Now the room was full of people and hazy with marijuana smoke; Hermione and her friends were grating some of their stash into a large bowl of chocolate cake mix, arguing over the quantities with benevolent intensity.
There was a ludic, end-of-term craziness in the gathering which made Bianca sad because she was excluded. The full length of her back was now against the wall and there were so many people around them that she could not move away. Breathing beer fumes, the printing tutor put his hand on her shoulder. He could hardly rape her with thirty people in the room. Since she was Bianca Berrisford, it was unlikely that anyone in the world of art would consider raping her anyway. It might be fatal to their career.
To be a Berrisford was to belong to a great dynasty. From the beginning of the century the family’s tentacles had reached out to embrace the entire world of art, and from the outset had recognized that they were also artists who only bought or sold. Now, when the creative eruptions of the Sixties were at full violence, the family stood for the moneyed, sophisticated elite who would guide the new Britain, loaded with talent and bright with money, to a position of worldwide eminence.
Bianca’s grandfather had been a great painter, a Royal Academician whose pretty reveries were now unfashionable but might be technically admired; his proud younger brother founded a gallery to sell his work. Bianca’s grandmother, arthritic as she had become, was still an accomplished amateur watercolourist; her father in his turn had turned his uncle’s gallery into the famous auction house that bore their name.
Her mother made silver jewellery which just at that time was acutely fashionable. There was an aunt by marriage who sculpted, a runaway cousin who photographed, a huge diaspora of relatives who administered, or curated, or restored, or lectured about or financed art. The ex-wife of the son of one of her grandfather’s uncounted illegitimate children ran a venue for happenings in a derelict fruit warehouse in Covent Garden, and was warmly acknowledged by the clan who held creativity to be their blood bond.
Their handsome white villa stood proudly in its garden in the heart of Chelsea, with a blue plaque over the door commemorating her grandfather’s residence. The house was permanently awash with artists, gallery owners, collectors, publishers, academics and thin, hollow-eyed art groupies, all jostling in their orbits around the Berrisford star, eager to believe that culture was breaking free of upper-class control, that they would be on the barricades in this social revolution and that a new class of art patrons would finance a new Renaissance.
To be born a Berrisford was to accept art as an inevitable destiny. Bianca had never questioned her path in life, only her own fitness to follow it. She was, however, well accustomed to admirers who were merely dazzled by her heritage.
‘What I hate about people like you’ – she folded her arms and leaned heavily into the wall – ‘is that although you say you don’t care about things, actually you do.’
‘I care about you, Bianca. You’re beautiful and talented and …’
‘My mother is beautiful. My father is rich. My grandparents were talented. Could your judgement have been influenced at all, do you suppose? I seem pretty ordinary to me.’
‘But you are good, Bianca, honestly you are. Look, come and do printing next year with me and I’ll prove it to you.’
‘Oh, don’t listen to him, love.’ The noisy neighbouring group suddenly surrounded them. ‘Don’t let him talk you into mucking around wi’printing. Come and do sculpture wi’us.’ She eyed them with gratitude, six large men in frayed Shetland sweaters standing with glasses clamped firmly in their fists and smiles on their ruddy faces. Undoubtedly they were affecting their broad Northern accents to emphasize the integrity which a man or an artist could claim with birth into the industrial working class.
‘Half an hour!’ Hermione, her face flushed with the effort, manoeuvred a large baking tin of cake mixture into the oven and slammed the door. ‘Half an hour, everybody. Who wants to lick out the bowl?’ Eager hands reached forward and she passed them their prize, taking care to keep her hair under control. It flowed around her shoulders like a glistening brown-grey river, caught in swirls and eddies by the numerous beads decorating her velvet smock. Hermione was three years younger than Bianca, but people often assumed that she was the older sister since she was already an accomplished earth mother, deep-bosomed, mystical and fond of cooking.
Unconsciously, Bianca ran her fingers over her own cropped head. Intent on baiting the printing tutor, the sculpture students closed ranks around them both.
‘Sculpture’s where it’s at, really. It’s cool, is sculpture.’ The slim, freckle-faced man winked at his comrades over the rim of his glass and the tutor shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other.
‘Aye,’ the black-haired one added, ‘come wi’ us and do some welding, love. It’s a groove, you’ll like it.’
‘Forget all that poncey drawing lark. We don’t do none of that in sculpture.’
‘That’s for poofs, drawing is.’
‘Aye.’
‘You can get good and mucky doing sculpture.’
‘Aye, we like to get our’ands dirty in sculpture.’
Intimidated, outnumbered and with his masculinity tarnished, the printing tutor backed away, accepting defeat. ‘I really think you ought to consider screenprinting,’ was his final feeble offer.
‘Aye, come up an’see my etchings, ’ n all,’ muttered the freckled one with derision, and his companions laughed.
They were the kind of men who ran in a pack to give themselves courage. Individually they were nothing but provincial boys overawed by the metropolis; honest, uncomplicated, kindhearted and vulnerable on account of those qualities. Together they could impose their own perspectives, they were a company who could stand with their shields edge to edge and repel their enemies.
The dark-haired one shouldered through the crowd to the kitchen and returned with beer in glass bottles.
‘Can you drink Newcastle Brown?’ he asked with concern, suddenly aware that the band had captured one of the glossy Chelsea girls whose excessive self-esteem and disinclination to date Northern lads had been the cause of much bitter humour since their arrival in London.
‘I don’t know. Let’s find out.’ She gave him a
fleeting smile and put the bottle to her lips before they distanced her any further by producing a glass. ‘What do you work in?’ He had a strong face, with thick eyebrows, a slightly Roman nose and downturned, heavy-lidded eyes. There was something classical about him, and she had a flash vision of him chipping granite.
‘Tungsten tubes. Lights.’
‘Oh.’ From the kitchen area rose a rich aroma of chocolate cake with the sharp tang of hashish. Hermione was clattering plates.
‘But they’re very open, any medium you’re drawn to you can have.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Plastic, steel, concrete – there’s even a bloke working in video. I was surprised, I must say. They don’t seem to consider the expense very much down here.’
Bianca felt the leaden cloud of tiredness stealing around her once more. She had no desire to work in plastic, steel, concrete, video or tungsten tubes. Her foundation year at art school had taught her one ugly fact about herself – she was dull. No medium excited her, no course truly attracted her, no subject drew her except the human body. The realms of space, planes and light, the adventurous textures and the gigantic statements lured the other students like new worlds while she was content with faces and bodies. She admired people who created heaps of tin cans to criticize the throwaway society, or multiple nipples on video for the sake of liberating human sexuality from centuries of repression, but for herself she wanted only to catch the curve of a shoulder or the motion of an arm.
Her tutors muted their disapproval but it was constant. If she painted a woman in a room, they gently suggested that she remove the woman. Her melancholy study of an old man’s face had prompted the comment that the light on his nose was the real focus of the picture. There was no advance between her work and the genteel studies of his lovers in his garden for which her grandfather remained famous. She was hardly fit to create a picture postcard.
The lights were dimmed to their lowest, temporarily causing a lull in the conversation. At the stove, Hermione ignited a bunch of sparklers and began to stick them in her Indian joss-stick holder, squeaking as she dodged the sparks. A thoughtful soul turned up the lights sufficiently for her to complete the task. There was a cheer as the cake with its blazing crown was raised to shoulder height and carried into the throng.
‘What about collage?’ Bianca asked, without enthusiasm.
‘There’s several blokes doing that. Objets trouvés, old cans, bits of cars.’
‘Hmmn.’
‘What do you think you’d be interested in?’
‘Cake, anyone?’
‘Hey, thanks love!’
‘Oh wow!’
‘Really great.’
As they extracted hot, crumbling helpings from the baking tin, the other men regrouped and left them to develop their own awkward conversation. She sensed that he was superior among them, that it was natural for him to carry off a prize female such as herself, and that the rest would support him proudly in the adventure. Bianca was well accustomed to the role of a sexual trophy, but was certain that this man had no desire to capture her.
‘Thanks, Herm. It looks good.’
‘Have this end, it’s burnt at the other.’ She beamed at them both, looking from one to the other with curiosity, her Tibetan earrings tinkling as she turned her head.
Bianca swallowed a handful of warm crumbs, pulling a face at the bitter aftertaste, and returned to the conversation.
‘I don’t really know. Bodies, I like working with bodies.’
‘Performance art, you mean?’ He was holding his own slab of cake uncertainly, as if hoping someone would take it away from him:
‘You don’t have to eat that. She won’t be offended, she’s cool about everything, my sister. There’s not enough sugar in it anyway, it tastes awful.’ He nodded thankfully and returned his portion to the tray as it passed. ‘God no, not performance art. I just like people, the peopleness of people. The human essence. You know.’ She had at least developed a convincing rationale for her deficiency.
‘That’s original.’
‘No it isn’t.’ For the first time he looked at her directly and against all probability she read his expression as sympathetic. She felt uncertain. ‘People have been painting each other for millions of years.’
‘There must be something in it, then.’ Another unlikely occurrence, her mouth was smiling.
‘I’m sorry, you were being sarcastic.’
‘I wasn’t, not entirely. What’s art for if it doesn’t tell people something about each other?’
‘Is that what you’re doing with your lights?’ At the back of her mind was a rumour she had recently heard which seemed to have some relevance.
Defensively, his eyes flickered. ‘Well, folk can certainly see each other better when I switch them on. Tell me something …’
‘What?’
‘If you have so much trouble with who you are and your family and all, why don’t you move out of here? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not giving you advice, but I can see it must be tough for you and, well, they’re literally on top of you, aren’t they?’
The notion had occurred to her many times, but life outside the Berrisford galaxy had seemed shadowy and unreal. Now that this big man, with his vivid features and deep voice, and the extra dimension of being an absolute outsider to the Chelsea scene, was positing the idea, it seemed more tangible.
‘I should, shouldn’t I?’ He nodded and there was an energy connecting them which she could not interpret. ‘You know, I have been thinking about sculpture. I was quite interested in maybe doing body moulds or something.’ Tentatively, she picked at her fingernails, her eyes averted to hide her full intentions. In an American avant-garde art magazine she had seen pictures of work moulded directly on models and realized that the technique would enable her to appear interesting while concealing all her faults.
‘We’ll be seeing you next year, then?’ He spoke too eagerly – a sign, at last.
The room was changing. A few people were settling down on the floor, ready for a long stoned night. Van Morrison was remembering Cypress Avenue. The rest, with other tastes or invitations, realizing that there was no longer enough dope to share, were moving languidly out into the garden and then on to the street. The dark man’s friends were arguing about their next party and how they would reach it.
‘I’m the one with a car,’ he told her, shrugging helplessly as he was pulled by the sleeve towards the door.
‘So is the lass on for it, or what?’ demanded the freckled man, half from Bianca herself.
‘On for what?’ She had not felt flirtatious for months, but now she followed them to the door and leaned teasingly against its edge, still smiling.
‘This is Joe – don’t mind him, he’s one of them unmannerly Northern lads.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ Joe responded, shaking her hand with enthusiasm. ‘So are you coming to do sculpture wi’us, or are you going to do printing wi’that daft git?’
‘She’ll be wi’us, Lovat, in’t she?’
‘Gotta be.’
‘Bound to be.’
‘Cut it out, fellas.’ They tumbled drunkenly up the stone-flagged stairs to ground level and disappeared in the darkness one by one. The sticky yellow glare of the street lights coated the leaves of the magnolia tree beside the house and Bianca noticed that the sky was lightening beyond the high brick walls of the garden. The dark one paused at the head of the stairs but she closed the door rapidly before she could say something stupid.
‘Do you think I should do sculpture, Herm?’ Her sister was lying sprawled on the window seat like the death of Chatterton.
‘I think you should listen to the voice inside you and do what it says.’
‘Bianca, do you know who that was who was trying to pull you?’ The second voice belonged to Shona Crawford-Pitt, who wore velvet bows in her thick blonde hair, and smart loafers with her jeans, and was the most obvious of all the people who tried to attach themselves to the Berrisfords bec
ause of their name.
‘Don’t be daft, he wasn’t trying to pull me. Lovat, his name was, I heard the others say it. He’s a second year, isn’t he? Oh no!’ Finally the faint memory of a new rumour sharpened in her mind. ‘That’s not the one who’s doing the bank job, is it?’ The sensation of the last weeks of term had been the second-year student who had been commissioned to produce a work for the atrium of a large American bank. A corporate contract of that size would have been a coup for a major mature artist; for a student, let alone a mere second-year student, it was either tantamount to a certificate of genius or proof of absolute moral bankruptcy: the body of the college was passionately divided on the issue.
‘Of course it is! You goof, that was the great Lovat Whitburn.’ Even when she was stoned Shona’s patrician squeal was enough to crack glass.
‘Oh, God, that ghastly breadhead. What a pity. He didn’t look like a class enemy.’ Hermione rolled over to pass the joint.
‘Herm, you’re so uptight! What’s wrong with someone doing a gig for a bank? Money doesn’t make you a bad person – why am I telling you this, of all people? Daughter of the Affluent Arts, you should know.’ Shona swallowed a mouthful of smoke the wrong way and coughed violently. ‘Shit! Now look what you made me do. Anyway, whatever you think about him he’s a real turn-on, you must give him that. I mean, all that rough trade in sculpture’s pretty juicy but he’s just pure sex on legs – eh, Bibi?’
‘Whatever turns you on.’ Bianca replied, preoccupied. She did not care for pet names and the fuss everyone made about sex mystified her. She had tried it, conscientiously, with several pleasant men, hoping to feel some transcendent emotion that would give meaning to her life, but finding instead that it was a messy and disappointing pastime. Picking up the last few crumbs from the cake tin she strolled away to her bedroom, preoccupied with her future.
The Sunday morning was bright and warm by the time she was fully awake and for the first time for many years she saw the day’s tasks lying before her in a clear and inviting succession. Persuading the Berrisfords to accept her decisions required a strategy which by now was well practised. The family cowered under the prevailing disapproval of her father; as a small child Bianca had discovered that he would always refuse any straightforward request and spend much time explaining why she was stupid to have made it. Her mother, who spoiled the girls to disguise her profound boredom with them, would agree to anything. The person most attuned to her interests was her grandmother, but the older woman was a natural peacemaker, reluctant to intervene in conflicts between her son and his wife. The best procedure, therefore, was to gain the approval of both mother and grandmother and persuade her father that the matter was a female, domestic affair that was beneath his interest.
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