Conversations With Mr. Prain

by Joan Taylor

  He took a few seconds before continuing. “One evening, when I was here, Monique and I were playing a game of chess upstairs in the gallery. My mind was not completely on the game, and I had drunk rather too much gin, I’m afraid to say. It was late. I didn’t want to go to bed, for fear of another night lying awake, thinking. I was taking a long time over making my move, and Monique became restless and asked if I would mind if she looked closer at some of the photographs. We had never played up there before, only in the study where you and I had tea, so I said by all means, she was welcome to do so. As I stared at the board, I became aware that she had stopped in front of the photograph of you. I couldn’t help but ask her what she thought of it.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “He smiled pensively. “Vénus” He pronounced the word in the French manner.

  “Well, I’m flattered.”

  “You see, Stella, there’s an expression that comes across your face sometimes, which is very inward. It’s there in Johns’ photograph. There you are, stark naked, and yet because of that expression you are hidden. Monique explained that this was a characteristic of the ancient Roman sculptures of Venus. Her expression is always inward, not ‘come hither.’ She is lost in a dream.”

  So I did look lost in a dream. “It’s the contrast between the interior and the exterior,” I said, attempting to understand.

  “Yes, that is more or less what Monique said. She liked the photograph very much. So, of course, I could not resist revealing that I had met a woman who was just exactly the image of that model. I told her the story, how I had taken my niece and nephew to Camden, and had seen you there, and was forced back time after time by the idea of seeing you again. I told her everything, blame it on gin if you like. But I felt finally that I had to tell someone, and Monique I could trust. Then she suggested—” Another pause. “What?”

  “Well, she said that she had long been wanting to sculpt a modern Venus, and she suggested that I ask you to pose for her to make a sculpture. She would sculpt a block of marble for me. I would pay for materials as usual, but she would give me the sculpture when it was finished. That would ‘call us quits’ if you like. She would then return to France. She said it would interest her very much to sculpt such a piece, and I would have—”

  “—an effigy,” I said, completing the sentence.

  So that explained it. He wanted a Venus; not me myself, but a goddess. A graven image, a thing, a product. Monique, being an expert at creating a semblance of a classical form, could do it. She herself wanted to experiment with sculpting the goddess of love, and I was to be the model. There was something in it for her, and she owed him much. This would not be like taking off my clothes for the life classes at Slade, or for Denis Johns, whose passion for the luminous qualities of flesh as object forbade interest in flesh per se. This engagement would not be so pure. My image in stone would not be so much art but icon. Edward Prain wanted an ideal female form preserved forever.

  “And what now?” I asked, with some concern that perhaps I had failed to live up to the archetype in this particular activity.

  He repositioned himself so that he could look at me, and ran his fingers down the curve of my side.

  “I thought I had a perfect solution. I don’t trust love, Stella. I don’t trust passion.”

  And then he kissed me, with untrustworthy passion, and the wheels turned again.

  When I awoke it was night. There were stars in the black sky and the moon shone like a torch into the bedroom. I could see Edward Prain’s slumbering form next to me. I guessed I had been asleep for about an hour.

  Now I lay beside him, wondering. His offer bubbled in my head, along with the poem that had come to me as I walked up to the bathroom. The side of myself that was spitting out the poem seemed antithetical to the side of myself that was considering the offer, and lying in Edward Prain’s bed. Looking at his shadowy body, he seemed perfectly harmless and benign. It would be easy to take everything he wanted to give: his money, his house, his caresses. All I had to do was expose my flesh to a third party, a reputable artist at that.

  There were people I knew who would not dream of ever having sex with someone like him. Ideology was a business for private as well as public places, and you did not sleep with the enemy. In fact, I think I have espoused such a view myself at times. Would I sleep with a racist? No. Would I sleep with a queer-basher? No. Would I sleep with a right-wing capitalist? Well just look at me.

  So where did I draw the line here? Why was this OK? Was there a point where desire just had to be obeyed? Or perhaps it was something else: a challenge, a fight? Or maybe, somewhere, I recognised his need for redemption. I saw him as a little boy in that drawing room downstairs, unloved, unvalued. Everything could boil down to that. That was what had given me permission.

  And yet, why would I want to be an instrument of his redemption? Why would I want to teach him he could be loved?

  I sighed and rolled over, wishing he would wake and distract me from these thoughts, and yet feeling I should spend the time to think. It seemed so hard to process anything half-rational.

  His offer. His offer.

  He wanted my body, but as an objet d’art, albeit of the most arousing kind. I had no idea what particular perversions were cloistered behind his face, those dark eyes. He was surely warped on some level. He did not want me as a real woman as much as he wanted an image of me, an erotic ideal. I, mere mortal, had too many imperfections and inadequacies he would not be able to endure. A real, flawed woman like me was a daunting prospect. He shied away from any long-term challenge. As stone, I would be approachable. As stone, I could remain a dream, and whisper sweet everythings.

  Why this? Why? It wasn’t as if everyone that met me thought of me as Venus incarnate, or even particularly beautiful. I do not think of myself as stunningly pretty. What had happened here to create this kind of reaction?

  It had to be the photograph. It was Denis Johns who had worked the magic. By creating the image, using me as his source, he had made something with a life of its own, and I had become Cinderella Aphrodite by that wand of art, so that Edward Prain was confusing me with a creation from Johns’ mind. I was not that girl, but there was no use fighting it.

  Is that what film stars feel, I wondered. They get the same treatment: they are packaged into a character in a movie, or in a photo spread, and everyone believes they are magnificent, beautiful and other-worldly, and even the pictures you see of them in trainers and track-suits looking like everybody else dissuades you not a jot from your deep perception that they are counted among the gods. It’s all the same dynamic.

  Or a book, a best-seller. Success breeds success. It might not be divine, but somehow with the right packaging and PR it becomes that thing everyone craves. Put it on a pedestal.

  Could I do this? Could I allow myself to become a graven image? Would he always distinguish between art and religion, sex and fantasy? He was not insane, after all. He was not a madman. Could he become one? And what was I supposed to do after he possessed me as immutable object? Was I to wander away never to unsettle his circumscribed universe again?

  Walk away from it and keep things separate, I told myself. Have him as a lover, and let everything else go. Or don’t even have him as a lover. Reject everything. To accept the offer would give him power over me. Just take the whole experience as fodder for the next novel. Keep writing, submitting, trust creative instincts. So what if I don’t get a novel published for years. There were plenty of great novelists in the past who had to watch lesser writers sell inferior products and bask in glory, while their better works remained unappreciated and unpublished: James Joyce, of course, being the one everyone knows about. He began the first draft of what would become Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1904, aged 22, finished it in 1908, and had it published in full for the first time only in 1916, when he was 34. And then there were all the problems with Ulysses, and Finnegan’s Wake.

  But the most astonishing case
was Jane Austen. I had recently read in a biography that, even though she had been writing since her teens, her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, appeared only six years before she died (at the age of 41, on July 18, 1817). She did not let go of her characters, even when the first draft had been completed 17 years earlier and she had not got it printed. She once wrote that she could no more forget Sense and Sensibility “than a mother can forget her suckling child.” The first draft of Pride and Prejudice, entitled “First Impressions,” was written 16 years before the novel’s publication, in January 1813. She might have hoped for publication success long before, when she sold her novel, Northanger Abbey, to Mr. Richard Crosby in 1803, but nothing came of the sale, since Crosby took no steps to publish it. Thirteen years later, after her literary success, Northanger Abbey was bought back from Crosby, where-after it was considered for publication and rejected! It was only printed in the winter after Jane Austen’s death, along with her last novel, Persuasion. It had struck me that she had begun working on her fourth novel Mansfield Park, in February 1811, when not a single one of her works had yet been published. That showed considerable self-belief.

  But then I thought of her circumstances. Jane Austen did not sell her soul to gain writing space. She was a lady, unmarried, looked after by her family. She had time built into her station in life, as you see in her heroines. Ladies sewed, talked, went on outings, meandered about gardens and country lanes, visited friends and relatives, fielded suitors and other gentlemen of interesting dispositions, supervised their servants, dined, dressed, undressed, slept. They went to stay with far-flung members of the family, during which periods their principal worry was how to spend their ample supply of time in a tolerably amusing fashion. Jane Austen, it seemed to me, had all the time in the world.

  Oh Jane, Jane, what should I do? I imagined her, looking at me then, from where Edward Prain and I had stood at the window. She was gazing at me, full of deep disapproval at my moral laxity and surrender to passion.

  “Come on,” I said to her. “I bet you did really have a clandestine love affair, despite your stress on reason and self-control. That’s why your sister Cassandra burnt some of your letters. And you know very well about men like Edward Prain. You know such men better than I do.”

  “Stella, take heed: you must beware.”

  “But I can be careful. I can make the situation work for me.”

  “You understand nothing, my dear. Do not trust that which you do not know.”

  “But what could he do to me?”

  “Think, Stella. Use your wits.”

  At this, Edward Prain gave a kind of groan and rolled over, but sleep caught him again, and I was left alone, without Jane Austen’s sound advice any longer, in the silent dark.

  I became aware that I was hungry. I wondered if I could navigate my way down to the kitchen in the silvery darkness of that great house. Perhaps I would not be able to find light switches, I thought, and would get lost. I resolved myself to staying in bed for a little longer.

  I looked over at him again lying peacefully asleep, and tried out various statements whispered aloud to his deaf ears.

  “I am hopelessly in love with you,” I said. No, that did not quite ring true. There was some truth in it, but it was not right.

  “I dislike you intensely,” I said, after a little while. Again, this had some truth to it, but it was definitely not correct.

  “I want to have sex with you as often as possible over the next three months.” This seemed to be reasonably certain.

  “I never want to see you again.” This was absolutely false.

  Having established the relative degrees of truth in all these statements, I let my mind wander back to seeing him at Camden Lock Market. Now that I had familiarised myself with his country surroundings, the juxtaposition of Edward Prain and the Market seemed even more bizarre. Did he come by tube, alighting at dingy Camden Town to walk up a broken, crowded escalator in the dilapidation of the underground station? Was he stopped by beggars: the homeless and the addicts? Did he push himself out into the noisy, littered street, with car brakes squealing and traffic snarling past, too close to all the masses making their way to the Market? Did he dodge between the road and the street vendors, who were yelling out for him to buy their cheap CD’s, DVD’s, games, t-shirts, mechanical toys and garish posters? Did he get in the way of the roller-skaters and skate-boarders, who used the footpaths as rinks? Did he manage not to be jostled by gangs of streetwise kids who always assembled in Camden each weekend, with their outrageous clothes and hairstyles and disdain?

  Camden does have its gentrified side, and luxury apartments, but it will never lose its grot, and those with money who live here are always a bit of an anomaly to me: the kind of people that want to be more cutting-edge than the Islington crowd, people who perhaps used to live here as students.

  As for the Market, it is not what it used to be, according to the stallkeepers I know. There is animosity between these stallkeepers, who often consider themselves artists of some kind, and the hawkers who sell anything for a fast quid. The story goes that once the Market was small, housed in a few ramshackle buildings: a booming hippie paradise. As time went on punks outnumbered hippies, and then everyone wanted to come, but it still prided itself on its individuality, and on the avant-garde items on sale. It continues to attract the people who dare to be different: an elite who know about the place and come regularly. Now the Market has moved both upmarket and down. It has better buildings, more quality antiques, designer fashions and art, and trendiness; but it also has cheap plastic hype products, trashy jewellery and mass-produced clothes. The clientele is, during the summer especially, young or tourist. Camden Market is the sort of contemporary, weird London visitors want to see: it has energy and design, but it also has filth, disorder and aggression.

  He has gone to Camden enough, I thought.

  chapter nine | the kitchen

  I roused myself and felt restless. My stomach was rumbling painfully.

  “Use your wits,” the imaginary Jane Austen had said. So perhaps it was time I did. Given Edward Prain’s unconsciousness, this would be an opportunity to find Monique, and try to prise information from her. I would not be confrontational. Mysterious Monique: could she tell me anything more? I kept remembering her knowing look. I wanted to make sure I knew everything.

  Carefully I slid out of the bed, put on my clothes, and also donned Monique’s cardigan. Edward Prain’s breathing was slow and steady and he did not stir. Then I crept out of the room in bare feet and felt my way down the few steps to the corridor, and along to the main hallway. There were long windows at both ends, and, in the moonlight, it was lighter than I had expected. I could make my way onwards to the stairwell without needing a switch. Soon I was on the ground floor, and I padded down the corridor that led to the kitchen, where there was light and the sound of clanging cutlery.

  I could smell food. This was a bit of luck: Monique and food in the same place.

  I opened the door slowly, and this time Monique noticed my entrance. She was stacking the dishwasher in a monochrome kitchen that was clearly the last word in chic design—black, white and metallic—straight out of a glossy brochure, yet somehow deeply reminiscent of an operating theatre. Where there might have been an operating table, below a low-hung range of spot lamps, there was a breakfast bar with tubular steel stools. My first impression was that Monique was clutching a mass of surgical instruments in her rubber-gloved hands, when she was actually holding knives, forks and spoons.

  “Good evening,” she said, smiling cordially, not unduly surprised to see me. At this point, however, I realised I had done nothing with my Medusa hair and wished I could rewind the action, as in a Jean Cocteau film, and walk backwards to the bedroom, where I would tie it up neatly.

  “Hello,” I said, combing loose curls through with my fingers and hoping they were not springing up at right angles from my head.

  “You have left him again?” she asked,
teasing a little. But she showed no discomfort. He must have told her briefly about what had been said in the drawing room when he went to borrow her cardigan. She could guess the rest. She seemed almost a little satisfied, as if she had been anticipating just this turn of events. There was nothing prudish about her, or jealous. She was pleased I had succumbed to erotic activity.

  “He’s upstairs asleep,” I said.

  She smiled slightly and returned to putting the remaining dishes and cutlery in the machine.

  Had she been his lover once? I felt I had to establish whether this had been the case, but I could not ask her outright. First, however, I wanted food. “Could I possibly make myself a sandwich?” I asked.

  “Ratatouille?” she suggested. “I have eaten. There is a ratatouille I have made in here for you and Monsieur Prain.” Monsieur, again. She pointed to an oven built into the wall. The kitchen was stream-lined with every possible appliance and convenience, neatly hidden behind white cupboards, so that unless you knew where the microwave or fridge were located, you would be vainly pulling out roller drawers and opening shelves of glasses and tableware. It was as well-groomed as Monique herself. She suited the place. She suited him. I was so blowzy and unsophisticated in comparison. Her image and his went together perfectly. But I was their antipodes: the total opposite.

  “Ratatouille …” I said, noting that I was not pronouncing it in her proper French fashion, the accenting that created a kind of rushing “wee” noise finished with air hissing through back teeth, rather with the “oo” and an “ee” distinctly said at the front of the mouth. “I should wait until Edward wakes up,” I said. “A snack would be great though.”