by Tessa Hadley
—Why would you want to shut that out? Iris asked reasonably, gesturing to the view of pale tiered wedding-cake terraces, steeply dropping woods, the twisting ribbon of the river, the cranes of the city docks (neglected because most of the traffic had gone to the port at the river’s mouth where Joyce’s uncle worked). Beyond the river, spreading to the hills in the distance, the flat plain was built up with Victorian terraces, warehouses, and the sprawling tobacco factory. It was scarred with ruined churches and waste plots where the bombs had fallen.
Iris made coffee in a little metal pot that sat on the gas ring, real coffee, which Joyce had only ever tasted in France. It was bitter and thick, not like she remembered it, but she swallowed it down as best she could, eagerly, like an initiation.
—Look, Ray, said Iris, isn’t she just one of those Epstein bronze heads?
Ray was stretched out on the chaise longue reading the newspaper with his shoes off, bright yellow socks showing a hole. Iris swept Joyce’s hair up and held it in a twisted knot on top of her head; she took Joyce’s chin in her fingers and pushed her face round to present her profile. Iris’s hands were very fine-boned, like all of her; she was dark and tiny with a miniature perfection Joyce yearned for: creamy pale skin, high cheekbones, slanting interrogative eyebrows, a tense high rib cage, a long swinging rope of dark hair down her back. She smelled of the unusual French soap she used, made with honey and almonds; her nails were perfectly shaped and painted a dark crimson like her lipstick. Her slender fingers were weighted down with huge exotic rings she’d found for next to nothing in junk shops. Joyce knew she would have passed over these rings if she’d been looking, thinking they were brash and cheap, not seeing how clever and striking they could be if you knew how to carry them off.
Ray bestowed a cursory glance on Joyce, Iris holding her still for him to see; he grunted something that might have been an indifferent assent. She was embarrassed. She didn’t want him to think she was pushing herself on his attention.
—It’s your wonderful chunky squareness, said Iris. You should wear your hair like this. And some huge primitive earrings, like an Easter Island statue.
Gently, not wanting to offend her friend, Joyce pulled away her head and shook out her hair, blushing.
—I couldn’t get away with it, she said. I’m not beautiful like you.
Ray grunted again.
Joyce did begin to grow her hair, though, so she could wear it in a swinging rope.
* * *
Because ray had so recently been a student himself (he was only five or six years older than Joyce), he mixed with the students as much as with the other teaching staff. The crowd around him and Iris gathered at the Gardenia Café, or at the Friday jazz club, held on a disused floor of one of the old tobacco warehouses, or at one another’s flats and houses for parties. In fine weather, in their breaks, they draped themselves around the statuary of the Empire fountain opposite the entrance to the college: there were photographs of them disporting among the sea folk, someone astride a mermaid’s tail, a face with puffed cheeks pretending to blow a Triton’s trumpet, hands squeezing a pair of verdigris-green bronze breasts. The men in the crowd were noisier and more argumentative than the girls. They were older, many of them had already done their two years’ National Service; the girls mostly deferred to them. And there were more of them, of course. Passionate discussions raged, always through a thick cloud of cigarette and pipe smoke: over art, over jazz, over privilege and class. At that time in the mid-fifties all the men wanted to be working class; they argued over whose parents were most authentically proletarian. Ray Deare’s father was a traveling representative for the Co-op; Dud Mason’s worked in a local print shop; Pete Smith’s had been a milkman but now worked in an office for General Electric. Stefan Jeremy kept quiet; everyone knew his father was a partner in a London firm of architects.
The men leaped up shouting in the Gardenia sometimes, when the argument got too heated, and threw back their chairs and were asked to leave by the waitresses. Some of these waitresses, the attractive ones, would even be invited into the arguments to adjudicate. Dud Mason, big and bear-shaped, untidy curls pushed behind surprisingly tiny ears, would call them over to decide whether there was any point in figurative art any longer. Or Yoyo Myers, who was short and springy, with a face as pretty as a girl’s, and played the tea-chest bass in a skiffle band, would ask them whether they liked, really honestly liked, the sound of modern jazz. Some of the waitresses were students at the art college or the university; some reappeared later in the crowd as girlfriends of the very men they had had to ask to leave.
Joyce could have told everybody that her father had worked as a lowly porter on the railways, but the girls didn’t seem quite as keen to own up to their working-class roots. Everyone had their idea of a rough-hewn male hero with cap and muffler and coat collar turned up (men at the art college turned their collars up), but there didn’t seem to be any glamorous aura attached to his female equivalent. The right match for the rough-hewn male was a soignée and worldly-wise female (who would perhaps tactfully temper his passions and smooth his rough edges). Lenny Barnes, for instance, made no efforts to cover up the fact that she’d been to finishing school in Switzerland. It was all a scream and ridiculously silly; she told stories about how they walked around with books on their heads and practiced getting out of cars. There was actually a false car seat and a false door for them to practice with.
—I mean, as if people who haven’t been to finishing school are always knocking themselves out when they do it, or falling in the gutter or something. Or perhaps they can never get out of cars at all and just have to drive round and round in them forever.
Lenny would add casually, though, that of course you did learn a few things at a place like that, and she supposed it gave you a certain confidence.
The girls didn’t argue as heatedly as the men. Sometimes they were funny and made everybody laugh, or sometimes they lapsed out of the arguments into their own talk, the sort of talk the men disapproved of: who had fallen for whom, who was going with whom; scandal about someone pregnant, or envious gossip about some couple getting married. The men didn’t mind hearing that, say, Pete Smith had gone to bed with Sonia Kirschbaum; there was a whole code of response to that: a teasing acclaim for the man next time he was spotted, a smoky look of new appraisal at the girl. But they didn’t want to discuss it, to explore its implications. Certain less good-looking girls who went to bed with too many of the men got a reputation and were spoken of with mock horror, the men pretending to be on the run from their predatory and smothering attentions. The other girls laughed at this.
Iris didn’t gossip; she would sit cross-legged, even on the tall stools in the Gardenia, her chin in her hands, absorbed in listening to what Ray was saying.
—He’s a genius, she told people flatly.
If Ray heard her he looked uncomfortable. Some of the others thought Iris was affected and took against the proprietary way she talked about Ray, as if she were the priestess at his shrine. They all had high hopes of him, however: his inventiveness, his forceful different opinions, his charm. He was part of the promise they all held on to, that what was going on at the college would count for something later.
Pete Smith told Iris that genius was an invention of bourgeois individualism, and that art could only become meaningful again when the artist was restored to his position as the anonymous chronicler of the collective. Iris smiled her slow enigmatic smile, lowering eyelids painted with thick black lines, tapping one of her Sobranie Black cigarettes out of the pack.
—Pete, she said, that’s such a nice picture, all the happy workers making their art together, each one putting in his little bit. But I’m afraid Nature isn’t so fair as you, she doesn’t make everybody just the same. How can you explain that the mark one man makes upon the paper is vivid with life, while another man can only make something secondhand?
Pete, who was lean and intense with a swept-back mane of hair and horn-r
immed glasses, shrugged coldly, taking this as a comment on his own work.
—I’m not interested in the man, he said, I want to feel history forcing its way into the art, destroying individuality, imposing itself ruthlessly.
Iris shook her head sorrowfully at him.
—You know, you have to love things in order to paint them.
—That sort of idea makes me sick, said Pete.
* * *
Joyce came to the college knowing next to nothing about painting. Her place had been awarded on the basis of the folder of work she had done at school. She had never been to an art exhibition. She knew the paintings in the city museum: although the Holman Hunts and the Ford Madox Browns and the Frederick Leightons melted her and set her dreaming, she understood quickly that she was not supposed to like them. The prints and pages torn out of magazines and pinned up on the walls in Miss Leonard’s art room at school had given her little inexplicable blasts and blazes of van Gogh and Matisse and Utrillo before she knew who they were. Even now she was at college, she couldn’t afford to buy art books; none of them could. When she got the chance—Ray and Iris had some books, and there was a college library—she pored over the reproductions, trying to make sense of what they taught in the Art History classes. She felt at sea amid such acres and centuries of work. There were whole centuries of religious paintings and fat nudes that she couldn’t make herself sympathetic to; they seemed to her stuffy and affected. It was so much easier to get excited about the modern things. Then Iris made her look at Piero della Francesca and Giotto and love them; she came to think of the trecento as a sort of Eden of innocence in art before the long fall into falsity.
Everything Ray Deare did made Joyce sure he was a genius. She listened to him in order to learn about life as well as painting. She had never heard anyone say the things he said. He said that art was play and that play was the truth of life, more real than work, duty, learning. He said he was ashamed of the dullness of obedient easel art, schooled and tamed. He said that sex was the true revolutionary act of play, and sex had to be put back into painting. Painting and sculpture were the only forms capable of keeping faith with the truth of the body. (Joyce surreptitiously glanced at Iris when Ray talked about sex, wondering whether she would give away any sign of their intimate life. Iris’s wide gaze at her husband never faltered; she didn’t even smile.) He said that an artist had to be an outsider in his own society in order to be any good, that art had to welcome every intimation that came out of the dark. He said the 1946 exhibition of Picasso at the V and A had changed his idea of art as violently and immediately as a collision with a charging bull, and anyone who thought Picasso had wasted his talent was an idiot without eyes. Or balls. He didn’t use quite these words in class, of course, but afterward, in the Gardenia or the jazz club.
He was often the noisiest and most extravagant in the crowd, and even when he was putting forward his serious view of things he waved his hands around and jumped out of his chair in such a way that you knew he was aware that there was something comical and exaggerated in his performance. He didn’t always say sensible or serious things. Sometimes you could tell he took a position merely for the sake of arguing it: that illustrations in women’s magazines should be forbidden by law or that the art market should be nationalized. When she first visited him and Iris in the flat, Joyce was disappointed. Ray seemed gloomy and was mostly silent, or he spoke with Iris about ordinary things Joyce had hardly expected him to know about: sandwich pickle they’d run out of, a shirt that needed ironing, or some fuse wire he wanted her to buy. (Joyce thought it might be for artistic purposes, but no, he just needed to repair a fuse.) She soon came to feel the thrill, though, of touching up against this tender material underside to his mysterious artist’s life. Anyway, it was a good job that Ray ignored her and left her and Iris alone to chatter. The idea of his asking her directly what she thought about anything made her hands clammy.
Ray’s paintings frightened her too. They were mostly paintings of people (this was what the college was known for; anyone who wanted to paint abstracts went to the Slade or St. Martin’s). They were nudes or portraits of friends; occasionally they were practice studies of fruit or flowers, or a bit of broken wall on a bomb site with weeds growing out of it. The subjects were elongated, squeezed, their faces hollowed, the eyes dark pits; his palette was muddy, browns and olive greens and creams, with a red he seemed to use to show energy (Iris explained this). Often there was red on the nipples of the nudes or between their legs. In the paintings of men friends a red light often hovered around the head like the tension of thought. There were a number of paintings of Iris, unmistakable despite the distortion because of the slanting lines of her face, like a bird, and the long ponytail: some nudes, some heads, one of her reading a book, one that seemed to be of her painting, splodges of jewel-like color squeezed on her opened hand as if it were a palette.
Whenever she found herself alone with one of his nudes, Joyce stared greedily at his treatment of the breasts, the belly, the mound of pubic hair; the swirling thick brushstrokes made the flesh into a rich bitter pudding, pawed and stretched the female shape into an exposing, arousing ugliness, with breasts slopped liquidly sideways or hanging loosely. She could see they were beautiful. The heaped-on thick pinks and creams and greens were a representation of how these bodies were pleasuring and powerful. Yet she felt a frisson of fear, as well as exhilaration, at the idea that her flesh might ever be stripped and seen like this. This picture of femaleness fought hard, in her idea of herself, with a different picture she clung to: the one derived from magazines and films, of flesh safely contained inside its flawless powdered skin, suggested by shadows under clinging clothes, contoured and lyrical and hidden.
* * *
The hours Joyce spent drawing in the long life room made her very happy. The room was austere and dilapidated, lit by tall windows on its northwest side, with off-white walls and bare floorboards sanded smooth by the caretaker, Mr. Bassett, with his sawdust and broom. You could draw from the plaster casts of Greek and Renaissance sculptures and bronzes that stood around, or from the skeleton who hung in her little sentry box at one end of the room, or you could draw from the live models, usually Mrs. Carey or Miss Alfred, who undressed in their “cupboard” and were kept warm with electric panel heaters in winter. Nothing must be allowed to move or change while you drew, even when everyone took a break: chalk marks were made for where the model’s chair and her feet and elbows went; you made marks for your own position, too, and for the “donkey,” the trestle where you rested your drawing board.
In the breaks the students smoked and leaned out of the windows overlooking the busy shopping street; or they warmed themselves against the fat old radiators. The models wrapped themselves in their kimonos. Some of them were thin and destitute-looking, brought in “off the streets,” as Pete Smith said: he called them casualties of the postwar austerity. Others were confident and extraordinary. Jean Alfred, who figured in so many drawings and paintings by the students and the teachers at the college, was said to have Gypsy blood in her; she was tall with a big square mouth and slanting cheekbones. She dated some of the best students and was rumored to be carrying on an affair with one of the older lecturers, as well as having a Gypsy boyfriend of her own. Her mother worked as a cleaner at the college in the evenings; they lived together in Churchtown, which was seedy and glamorously rough.
Joyce’s drawing improved. She learned to spend two and a half hours on an ear and a bit of neck, connecting them with the background, getting them right. She entered into a sort of trance as she worked, absorbed in seeing and translating, shocked if the teacher interrupted to show her something or if anyone new came pushing into the room past the thick black burlap curtain that hung inside the door to shut out sound and light and curious passersby. She did understand, though, that drawing was supposed to be a preparation for something else. It seemed a great problem that she didn’t really have any subject she urgently needed to paint. S
ome of the others were so sure already: Stefan Jeremy with his sooty cityscapes, Yoyo Myers with his weird bug-eyed portraits, Mary Anderson with her studies of theaters and circuses.
It felt as if this problem of her lack of a subject was all tangled up with something incomplete as yet in Joyce’s life with the crowd. She wasn’t clear what role she was supposed to play with them. They partly adopted her as a little pet, small and tidy and obliging and good fun, always ready with her admiration for other people’s work. They called her Ginger, although her hair wasn’t really ginger but a pale golden red. Yoyo took a handful of it and sifted through, sighing over it, despairing of ever being able to paint it because there were so many different colors: white and gold and auburn and strawberry. In fact, his painting of her head, with his characteristic staring bug eyes, won him the student prize that year and was the first painting he ever sold.
Joyce had been to bed with Yoyo and with a couple of the others too. (“Shagged,” the men called it, but the girls never said that. The word was hopelessly mixed up in Joyce’s mind with dirty old tobacco and the sailors who had muttered things down at the docks.) As soon as she started college she had set about ridding herself of her inexperience; the night she came home after her first time (they were still living in the old house then), she searched her face in her dressing-table mirror for signs of a new womanly allure. Her deflowering had not been in the least the bloody and momentous thing she had expected from her novel reading. So this was what people really wanted of one another; this act of playful childlike gratifications was the grown-up secret hidden under so much stuffy dullness! Everyone at college was going to bed with everyone else. At the beginning of the second year when they were queuing to reregister, Lenny Barnes pretended to start up an extra line and stood at the head of it, calling out, “Anyone queue here who’s still a virgin!”