by Julia Gray
Thursday. It is definitely a Thursday.
It must have been a quarter past four, because the school day was over. Perfect, who spent much of her life trying to find things to be perfect at, was going to run home along the Thames towpath. Sangeeta and Fred would take the tube. Ordinarily I’d have gone with them, stopping for chocolate and maybe a magazine or a coffee along the way. But on this particular Thursday, Life Class was due to be held for the first time that term. The head of art, Graham Gibbons – an adenoidal man with sparse red hair combed thinly over his head, like inadequate jam on bread – had explained to me that although it was listed as an optional club, regular attendance at Life Class was essentially compulsory.
‘It will mark the difference between an A and a B,’ he intoned, with unnecessary pomposity.
I allowed this to persuade me. Although I didn’t care particularly about getting straight As – I hadn’t made any plans yet for university courses or further study – I didn’t not care, either. Really, I’m not a joiner. If he’d called it Life Drawing Club, I would never have agreed to go.
The Art and Design Centre was in the basement of a large modern building at the edge of the school complex, beneath the gym. Whoever had designed the layout had not given much thought to the possibility that developing artists might like, in their efforts to observe and put the world in perspective, a bit of a view. It was more like the second act of a horror film down in the Art and Design Centre: damp, gloomy, littered with old props from stage plays. Flickering fluorescent bars lit the room where Life Class was to be held. There were maybe fourteen or sixteen students, and then there was the art assistant, a man called Jonah Trace, who would be directing the class. He couldn’t have been more than mid-twenties. Probably he was fresh out of art or teaching college.
Male teachers at an all-girls school were enough of a rarity to draw our immediate attention, and I had not seen much of Jonah Trace before, though I dimly remembered seeing him around the studios, pinning up sketches and scouring palettes. He was tall and narrow-shouldered, round-faced: what Evie would call ‘boyish’, and by which I think she would mean young-at-heart-looking. There were teachers who would try to be your mentor, and there were teachers who would try to be your friend, and Mr Trace was one of the second type. His warm brown hair was ruffled up with gel, and he had a soft Bristolian accent, easy to imitate. He talked a lot, I heard, about his girlfriend, although no one had ever seen her. Already, I heard, he had a fan club among the younger girls. Like I said: male teachers, especially those under forty-five, were a rarity. We weren’t fussy.
He went around the room distributing paper and sticks of charcoal. The heating was well up; it gave the air in the basement a sticky, dusty feel, as though particles of old paint were collecting on our skins.
I watched Jonah Trace, all elbows and awkwardness, open the studio door to welcome the model, and from the way he hurried forwards to kiss her on one cheek I decided that he must know her from somewhere. He showed her into the office, where she could get changed. When she emerged, I had to suppress a kind of judgemental surprise: surely you’d only take your clothes off in front of opinionated teenagers if you were long of leg and whittled of waist? This woman was not. She was thick from neck to ankle, like a badly made jar; her small breasts piled on top of each other like sandbags as she lay down, her dressing gown unwrapped, on a quasi-ceremonial plinth in the centre of the room. But, remembering that my father always said that we can take delight in drawing anything and anyone, of whatever description, I felt bad about my judge-mental surprise.
Jonah Trace fussed with the folds of material around her stomach, pulling them ineffectually into other wrinkles. Then he began directing us.
‘Look carefully now at the angle of the neck, the relationship of the head to the shoulder. Draw what you see. Draw what you see, girls.’
He was nervous. Everything about him was nervous, from the glitches in his voice to the unsteady way that he held out his hand in front of the model to point out some miraculous curve or opportunity for shading. I thought: why so twitchy, Jonah Trace? Is this not the job of your dreams? Perhaps the heat was making him uncomfortable. Perhaps he had never led a Life Class before. Perhaps he fancied his friend, the model. But she was the picture of relaxation, her limbs unmoving, her face expressionless. Her professionalism delighted me. It made me want to draw her. I realised, as I looked down at my A3 sheet, that everyone else was much further along than me.
But before I had done much drawing, I began again, in that hot room on that Thursday in September, to think more about my father, the artist. His illustrations were so small they were practically miniatures. I remember his brushes, which he kept in a collection of old jars in his study; some had only a few teased hairs apiece, like insects’ brooms. Back in Paris, Evie had worked at a bar in Pigalle; I went to a local Montessori, and then to a funny international school where all we seemed to do was tell the time in four languages, and my father drew for work in the daytime, and pleasure in the evening. I loved to watch him at his high architect’s desk, a small tasse of black coffee on the floor beside his feet.
Often, he would give me a square of paper and a set of pencils and invite me to create something. ‘Draw me a monster,’ my father would say, in French. ‘Do not use green. He must have six eyes and a suspicious smile.’
I would puzzle this out, trying my best to capture whatever it was that my father had asked for, my fingers heavy with intent. A little chuckle of pleasure at the sight of my illustrations was what I lived for; his praise was worth more to me than pocket money.
‘Asleep, are we?’ said Jonah Trace.
I looked up; he was standing beside me, a look of disapproval drawing down his brows. I do not like to be interrupted when I am thinking about my father. I do not like being called we.
‘I’m just thinking,’ I said, which was true.
The art assistant seemed unimpressed. ‘I’m keen to move on to a smaller sketch in a minute,’ he said. ‘Best hurry up.’
And for the next forty minutes, he continued to glance irritably in my direction, or to come and stand behind my head, casting a long shadow over my paper, as though he had identified the potential Problem Girl in the room. Gradually, it began to have an effect on me; his nerves became my nerves. Two or three times, I had to start my work again, having mangled the jar-like body and sandbag breasts beyond recognition. Towards the end of the class, I managed to knock over the water glass of the girl next to me onto her work. The glass did not break, but the soft clunk was audible in the industrious silence and a pool of dark water engulfed her page. Before I could react, before I could even say sorry, Jonah Trace had leaped across the room with a handful of paper towels, awkward as ever.
‘Now you’ve done it,’ he said, clicking his tongue, blending the charcoal lines into a single indistinct smudge as he mopped up the spillage. ‘What a shame. What a real shame.’
I looked around, to see if anyone else could hear what I could hear. But I had no friends in this group of students; they were not all from my year, and I only knew some of them by name. No one had even looked up, except the girl next to me, who shook her head and smiled in a kind sort of way.
‘It was only a rough sketch,’ she said.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘It’s fine.’ She seemed embarrassed by the fuss.
At the end of the class, as Mr Trace sprayed our pages with hairspray and switched off the portable heater, he had words of praise for everyone except me. When I left, he looked at my work and shrugged, with a little side-nod of his head, as if to say, ‘I’d say you could do better, but you probably can’t.’
I do not like to be disapproved of. I hate it. It curdles in my bones, like the beginnings of some degenerative disease. From that day onward, I developed an instantaneous kindling of loathing for Jonah Trace, newly recruited art assistant at the Agatha Seaford Academy.
5
All through September, as the trees grew tired
of their leaf-colour and started to experiment with henna and Hovis brown, I continued to think about Jonah Trace. The first thing to do – the only fair thing, in the circumstances – was to ascertain whether that Life Class had been a one-off. It was a definite possibility: Mr Trace was new; he was stricken with the nerves of a recent teaching initiate; he understood that teachers needed favourites and unfavourites, so he chose me for the latter role. I was easy to pick out in a line-up, with my frayed-ribbon hair and my birthmark. If he struggled with names, as many new teachers did, he could identify us by the signposts of our skin, hair or jewellery, and give us crude labels. Megan Lattismore, for example, would be Large Breasts and Ponytail. I was Problem Girl with Birthmark. Fine. I could allow him this, if it were reversed once he had found his professional feet.
I would give him, temporarily, the benefit of the doubt.
I came early, but not too early, to Life Class the following week. I came early so that I could choose where to sit; it was important, I thought, that I should occupy a different space with, as my Aunt Petra would put it, a different energy – Petra was all for cleansing negative spaces with jagged hunks of quartz, for clapping her chubby hands into clogged-up corners. I was not quite in that league, but I saw her general point. I had not seen Jonah Trace all week, other than once, across a crowded lunch hall, and a second time, parking his moped in the staff car park. Neither time had he seen me. That was good. I didn’t want to misread his behaviour towards me. I wanted to be sure.
The room was nearly deserted when I entered. From the sounds of radio and kettle humming in the office, I deduced that our leader was in there, preparing for the session. Only one corner of the room was occupied. At first, I thought it was another student who had come early to Life Class, but it wasn’t. It was a girl in the year above me, working on a piece of coursework.
Annabel, she was called. I didn’t know her surname. I had an idea that she seldom came to school; whether through illness or lack of desire I didn’t know. She hadn’t been at Lady Agatha’s very long – a couple of years at most. Perhaps her family moved about a lot. I felt that I’d seen her in something – a choir, perhaps, or a Chapel assembly, or a debate. I couldn’t quite remember. It was said that she was the daughter of somebody famous, but this detail eluded me too. Annabel wore very unusual clothes: fairy wings, patched leather trousers, a headband woven from peacock-feathers. Evie would have enjoyed her outfits. Today was no exception: her russet skirts, properly voluminous, could compete with autumn itself, so much did they resemble a carpet of leaves, and in her feather-blonde hair was a thorny garland such as Jesus might have worn at his death.
Annabel was at work on a painting. She had not bothered with an overall, and was using her skirt to wipe her brush each time she dipped it into the jar of white spirit. The sleeves of her top were smudgy with oil paint.
As unobtrusively as I could, I found a table where I could see what it was that she was doing. I have always been interested in work-in-progress; years of watching my father had made me a lifelong admirer of those who have the commitment to finish pieces of art. Annabel’s painting was of a man and a woman standing on a wooden bridge, facing away from the viewer, their hands not quite touching. It was well-composed and somehow unsettling. It made you want to know more about the couple – how they felt about each other, and why. Just then Annabel turned, and for a moment met my gaze. She seemed to be considering me, evaluating. Then the blue-green eyes looked away again. I was of no interest to her.
‘Time you packed up, Bel,’ said Jonah Trace, coming out of the office.
‘Sure thing,’ she replied, in an American accent. Sure thang. But she was surely not American. ‘I’ll never get the goddamn thing done in time for the deadline,’ she added, and this time she said it in a kind of vowel-perfect Radio English.
I watched her clearing away her things. She did not tidy up much: she swept her brushes and jars into the sink, leaving her canvas where it was and sheets of newspaper, damp with linseed oil, all over the floor. Jonah Trace, I saw, was watching her too – quite casually, while he sharpened pencils, over by the window. Here was a moment of interest. Would he exercise his teacherly authority and ask her to leave the art room as she had found it?
He did not.
Annabel pulled on a kimono with a silvery belt and a long rip at the back. She picked up a Mary Poppins-ish bag. ‘Ta-ta,’ she said to Jonah Trace.
‘You dropped something,’ he said, stooping to pick up two or three leaflets from the floor.
‘Oh, my flyers. Thanks. Look – what d’you think of them? I helped with the design.’
‘Gimlet and the Grenadines,’ read Jonah Trace. ‘A twenty-four-hour play. Sounds very cool. And you’re in it?’
‘Yeah,’ she replied. ‘It’s not a big part. Just helping out a friend.’
‘Does it really take twenty-four hours to perform?’
‘Sure does.’
‘How d’you stay awake that long?’
‘Oh! That’s not difficult.’ She smiled at him generously. ‘You should come down. Tomorrow night, from midnight.’
‘Ah, that’s annoying,’ said Jonah Trace. ‘I’m at the footie this weekend.’
He sounded genuinely sorry that he couldn’t go. The look of sorryness persisted as he watched Annabel leave, with a sweep of kimono and a slam of the studio door. And at the mention of a play, I realised where I remembered her from: she’d been in last year’s Lower Sixth form production of Cabaret, the musical set in wartime Berlin. A glitzy, rather slick production it had been. Some of the props were still lying about in the art rooms. Annabel had played the part of Sally Bowles, made famous by Liza Minnelli in the film adaptation. Although her singing voice was not particularly strong, I remembered thinking at the time that her acting style sparkled with something genuinely brilliant, if a little uneven. There had been some kind of issue, though I forgot what exactly. She’d been very late for one of the performances, perhaps. Or some friends of hers had turned up drunk and disorderly. I wasn’t sure. I wondered what it would be like to perform in a twenty-four-hour play. It would require a peculiar kind of determination.
Jonah turned and saw me, and looked put out. ‘You’re very early,’ he said.
We had a different model this week – sinewy, flame-haired, prone to giggling – and a different assignment.
‘Draw a line down the middle of your page,’ said Jonah Trace. He was dressed more smartly today; maybe he had an event to go to later. I pictured him at the opening of some installation at a Shoreditch gallery, glass of tepid wine in one hand, girlfriend tethered to the other. What was his girlfriend like? I wondered. If he even had one.
‘I’d like you to draw Vanessa first with your dominant hand – right if you’re right-handed, left if you’re left-handed. I’d like you to spend about fifteen minutes on this,’ he said.
I noticed that he said many things twice; his speech patterns were curiously limited, as though he were a robot, or English were not his first language. I wondered if he repeated himself because he doubted his own authority.
‘Then – no cheating, please, girls – I’d like you to transfer your pencil to the opposite hand. Repeat the process. See what feels different.’
At this there were gasps and giggles, as he had probably predicted. Lady Agatha girls were known for their diligent, risk-averse attitude; Perfect was not the only student who openly yearned for perfection. The Life Class attendees would not like the imprecision of drawing with their undominant hand, the flaws in their artistry that this would expose.
I drew a line down the middle of my page. Jonah Trace put on Heart 106.2. For ten minutes, I drew Vanessa, who was making an effort to keep still, but who seemed unable not to smile when someone made eye contact with her by mistake. I used my left hand for this. I tried, as I did so, not to dwell on Jonah Trace and how he did not like me. He would like my work this week. That would be the way to his approval. My strokes with the 2B pencil were clear and def
inite; I captured the length of Vanessa’s spine, the way it flattened into a small plain before the round of her buttocks. I drew her ear, which was almost pointed, like a pixie’s, with just the right amount of hair falling over it. I got what for me is always a tricky bit, in faces: the exact relationship of the tip of the nose to the upper lip. By the time Jonah Trace murmured that it was time to move on to the other hand, I felt pretty intimately acquainted with Vanessa’s anatomy.
I was sitting in the corner, in front of the bookshelves and not far from where Annabel had been working. Jonah Trace, alerted to the huffy sighs and protestations that it was just too difficult, was over on the other side of the room. Vanessa reposed between him and me; all I could see was his dried-mud hair as he leaned over sketchbooks, talking about the left and right sides of the brain, something appropriated from New Scientist, I assumed. Meanwhile, I redrew Vanessa with my right hand. I took real care with this drawing, spending the same amount of time on the same parts of her body. The pencil rested more loosely in my grip; the resultant lines were lighter and more tentative. Yes. Good. The hair a little too much over the ear; the ear too pointed this time, like an architrave. Jonah Trace was nearing the bookshelves. He was very democratic about his time, moving from artist to artist with the regularity of a speed-dater. Now he had reached Megan Lattismore. Today Megan was wearing a black bra underneath her white shirt, difficult to ignore since she was generously endowed in the breast area.
‘Something we rarely think about when we write or draw is that the muscles don’t start in our hands, or even our arms,’ Jonah Trace was saying to her. ‘It actually starts all the way up here.’
To demonstrate, he touched her lightly, once, on the left shoulder, as she nodded and smiled and drew her lopsided sketch. Then – I tried to look as though I wasn’t watching – he touched her again, a gentle pat, as he moved away. A ‘keep it up, you’re doing great’ kind of pat, for sure. Harmless. And yet … a lidded, sleepy, guilty, transfiguring look flashed – just for a second – across his face. And he glanced straight down the open neck of her shirt. Just for a second.