by Anne Billson
It wasn't long before the shoe shop and I parted company. One day I got into a scrap with another assistant - an Argentinian girl who called me a 'beach' when I innocently directed the manager's attention to the bulge in her sweater. It turned out to be a packet of tights she was smuggling out on her lunch break. She swore at me in Spanish and ripped out a handful of my hair, so I punched her in the stomach. Customers looked on in amazement as we rolled around the floor, biting and scratching and crackling with static. It wasn't my fault, but the manager sacked us both on the spot. I was so outraged I rang up Lunar House in Croydon with a visa enquiry, and ten days later my Argentinian friend was shipped back to Buenos Aires.
My next job was in a Soho patisserie. Here, the staff were positively encouraged to help themselves to any merchandise left unsold at the end of the working day. Other assistants would gratefully tuck a Chelsea bun or two into their shopping-bags when they went home. I took this policy a step further by consuming what I wanted, when I wanted it: doughnuts, Danish pastries, eclairs, almond slices, strawberry tartlets. No one objected. I didn't get fat, exactly, but I got sort of plump.
But I had no intention of spending the rest of my life flogging croissants and custard tarts. I needed to broaden my horizons. I wanted an education in the University of Life. Before long, I'd built up quite a collection of scribblings and collages, so I shuffled them into some sort of order and managed to bluff my way on to a three-year diploma course in Fine Art.
I started making friends, but slowly. For a while, I floated along in my own little world, dropping into class whenever the fancy took me, but mostly skiving off and wandering through the back streets, eating sticky buns and peeking through windows, watching the people inside, wondering how much money they had, and what sort of lives they were leading. But as soon as I set my sights on Duncan Fender, my life snapped into focus. I started putting in long hours over my easel, attended as many tutorials as I could. At first I didn't run into him very often, but it didn't take me long to realize this was because he spent most of his time down in the darkroom. I began to spend time down there, too.
I knew I wanted him as soon as I laid eyes on the photographs which came peeling off the dryer. He'd been taking pictures of cemeteries: Highgate, Kensal Rise, Norwood, Brompton, Nunhead, Abney Park. All sarcophagi and skeletal trees, ruined chapels and crumbling stone angels. He spent a lot of time and effort printing up those negatives, burning in the sky so it glowered, dodging in all the shadowy details. Sometimes there would be figures flitting through trees in the background, but mostly it was nature in a state of shock, petrified and overgrown. One could tell he was deeply sensitive just by looking at his work.
I had to borrow a camera. I was one of the few students who didn't have a Pentax or a Nikon of their own. Sometimes it felt as though the college was being turned into an alternative finishing school for people on private incomes. By a cruel twist of fate, some of the wealthier students received full grants from local authorities befuddled by their parents' estrangements and remarriages and complicated custody arrangements. The extra cash came in useful for throwing parties, or buying clothes, or nipping over to Paris at weekends, while I was plugging up the holes in my own allowance by working Saturdays at the cake shop.
In my year, we had Susannah Stukeleigh of the Stukeleigh sales rooms, and Jane Appleby, whose father owned a string of racehorses, and Nancy Manners, whose coat of arms was familiar from a certain well-known brand of tea, and Ruth Weinstein, whose father was rumoured to be some sort of arms dealer. I insulted these rich girls to their faces, but they were always nice to me, because they found me colourful - except for my clothes, which were black. I wore black all the time back then, though in those days it required some effort to find black items - not like ten years later, when all the shops would be stocked to the hilt with fifty-seven varieties of little black frock. Back in the seventies, all-black attire was considered suitable only for widows and New Zealand rugby-players.
Susannah and Jane and Nancy and Ruth adored Duncan, because he had charm and he knew how to use it. They were flattered when he wanted to take pictures of them looking ethereal in graveyards. And they were fascinated by his background, because he came from genuine bohemian stock. His real name wasn't Duncan; it was something fancy like Donecan, or Duncannon, but he'd changed it because he was fed up with it being misspelled. Duncan's great-uncle had hung around with Kurt Schwitters, the Dadaist, and Duncan's father had also been a famous painter - though not so famous that any of us had heard of him. Even better, there was a rumour that his parents had once been involved in a menage a trois which had scandalized tout Paris. Duncan didn't talk about his family at all, but his reticence made the little that leaked out all the more tantalizing. Politely but firmly he discouraged all attempts at intimacy, and concentrated instead on his art. He worked hard, he always worked so hard, battering away at his personal muse, turning out beautifully photographed cemeteries by the score.
My own muse wasn't quite so complicated. It came in fits and starts - mostly waiting in the wings until I felt the need for attention. Then it would take centre stage and dance the fandango. One time, for instance, I added pieces of broken razor-blade to my latest collage. It was hailed as an artistic triumph, especially when one of the tutors slashed his finger and had to be rushed to hospital. Another time, I constructed a landscape out of calves' liver. Before the day was out it was swarming with flies and there were complaints about the smell, but still it was acclaimed as another tour de force. No one ever thought to ask how I was going to make a living out of artistic arrangements of offal and razor-blades. The tutors believed in Fine Art as a pure concept unsullied by commercial opportunism. They didn't care what happened to us in the world outside.
But the art served its purpose. No one could ignore it, not even Duncan. He took the bait - though hooking him was one thing, reeling him in was another. It became the central obsession of my life. He was the last thought I had before going to sleep, he was present in my dreams, and he was there in my head as soon as I woke up. And in the studio one evening, as I was packing up to go home, he came up to me and asked me out. Afterwards, I danced home in triumph. This was what I'd been waiting for. This was all the proof I needed - I was not an ordinary person, I possessed the power, and Duncan belonged to me.
And life, for a while, was like a dream. He was the teacher I'd been looking for; he showed me around town, gave me books to read, took me to Chinese restaurants and Japanese films - he liked samurai movies, and did a great impersonation of Toshiro Mifune in Yojimbo. He showed me round his favourite cemeteries, and I watched him take photographs, though for some reason he never took any of me. He always said he was going to, but he never got round to it. He promised that one day he would show me Pere Lachaise, in Paris. It was the best cemetery in the world, he said. Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison were buried there.
The funny part was - I'd fantasized about him so much that, in the flesh, he was disappointing, not nearly as exciting as I'd first imagined. Sex was no more than satisfactory, conversation brittle and superficial. We traded trivialities, and talked about popular culture, and that was it. I wanted passion and intensity, but he kept that part of himself locked away. Given time, I would have decided he wasn't worth the effort. Given time, I would have extracted what I needed, and moved on.
But time was what I didn't get.
One evening, I was alone in the etching department, up on the top floor. I had signed up for a crash course in etching because Duncan was going to be there all week, transferring some of his photographic designs on to plates, and I liked to keep an eye on him. That afternoon he had left early to return some borrowed equipment, but I'd stayed on. I'd rolled a layer of etching-ground on to a fresh plate and blackened it with one of those medieval-looking torches they still used in the department, the sort I imagined would be carried by villagers when they stormed the Transylvanian castle. I was working on the latest in a series of severed heads. I'd already
done Salome, and Isabella with her pot of basil, and now I was more than halfway through Medusa.
I could hear the faint noise of traffic outside, but the room seemed cut off from the rest of the world. The air was heavy with hot wax and lavender, and the smell was making me sleepy. I'd just finished scratching the last of the snakes into the lampblack and had slipped the plate into the acid. I was engrossed in the tiny bubbles when I heard someone humming. The tune was familiar, but I couldn't place it.
I looked up just in time to see her come in, and go directly to the desk where Duncan had been working. She stopped humming and studied his half-finished plate. Her head was bowed, and I couldn't see much of her face because her hair fell forward in a dark curtain, and she was bundled up to her chin in big fur. She was dressed all in black, like me, but her clothes didn't look as though they came from the Oxfam shop. She was smaller than me, and skinnier too, beneath all the wrapping. She had the tiniest hands and feet I'd ever seen; they were encased in black leather gloves, and in black leather boots with pointed toes and peculiar curved heels - I had never seen boots quite like those before. She was dressed as if for winter in Siberia, though the evening was unusually mild. The weathermen were attributing the unseasonably high temperatures to a drifting band of volcanic dust which was giving us a series of spectacular blood-red sunsets.
She bent over Duncan's desk, and - without removing her gloves - scribbled something on a scrap of paper. Then she stood up straight again, and the way she held herself you would have thought she was taller than she really was. As she turned to leave, her gaze met mine for the briefest instant. There was no surprise, because she'd known I was there all along - those eyes knew everything there was to know.
But she wasn't interested in me, not in the slightest. She broke eye contact almost immediately, and just before she disappeared she started to hum again. It wasn't until the humming had faded that I finally put my finger on the tune: one of Verdi's greatest hits, the drinking song from La Traviata.
I felt cold all of a sudden, as if she had left a breath of winter behind, but there was no particular sense of dread. Just fuzziness, as though I were coming round after anaesthetic. I went over to read her note. The handwriting was spindly, a trail of ink left by wandering spiders.
'Duncan - the DeMille, tomorrow night, nine o'clock. Violet.'
Violet, I thought. What an unusual name.
Chapter 2
Duncan said, 'I think I'm in love,' and the blood rushed to my head. For a few seconds I was flying higher than I had ever flown before - higher than I would ever fly again as long as I lived. I thought he was talking about him and me. This was the Age of Innocence, before the Fall.
I could be forgiven for getting it wrong, because for the last half hour we'd been discussing my favourite topic of conversation - me. Or rather, Duncan had been talking, and I'd been lapping it up. He'd been telling me what an extraordinary person I was, how rare, how talented, and how privileged he was to know me. I should have guessed something was up.
He might have been trying to soften the blow, but only succeeded in making it that much more crushing, when it finally came. He should have been brutal to start with. Here we were in this sandwich bar, and in between eruptions of steam from the Gaggia, I could hear Steve Harley singing 'Come up and see me, Make me smile', and I could hear Duncan saying how terribly fond he was of me, and he didn't want me to get hurt, and that was why we should stop seeing each other.
I couldn't believe my ears. I thought I was going to have a hysterical screaming fit, right there in the sandwich bar. Then something snapped, very quietly, like an old elastic band which had been stretched too long and too tightly in my head, and I felt my entire life shift into a different gear. I could see Duncan's lips moving. I could hear the traffic, and the patter of feet on the pavement, the murmur of voices and the distant wailing of a siren, and all these things were leaving vapour trails of noise. In that instant, my mind separated from the rest of me and struck out on its own. From then on, I was like a movie to which the wrong subtitles had been added; the written words bore no relation to what the voices were actually saying on the soundtrack. I was screaming inside, but it was with detached fascination that I could hear myself saying in a mild and reasonable voice, 'Yes, but we can still be friends.'
This was about a week after the note. When Friday evening came, I'd tried casually to entice him away from his rendezvous. With what had seemed like genuine regret he told me he had a prior commitment, an arrangement to meet with an old family friend, and in the morning he had to leave for Yorkshire - something about visiting his sick uncle, the one who owned the flat he was renting. Next Saturday, he promised, it would be different. Next Saturday we would go somewhere nice.
All right, I thought, let him go out with this woman if he wanted. An old family friend - maybe even old enough to be his mother. I thought of the bridge-playing turkeys my parents had always hung around with and decided she could pose no possible threat to me. I felt secure in the knowledge that I was someone special. Women like me didn't come along twice in one man's lifetime.
I was already aware of Duncan's habit of keeping in touch with ex-girlfriends. There were several of them around - strange women who drifted in and out of his life, who made guest appearances in his photographs every now and again. He said, only half joking, he had always found it difficult to let go of the past - he worried that a clean break would make him lose his grip on the present as well. So it didn't seem odd he should want to keep in touch with an old family friend. Especially since there didn't seem to be a lot of family left.
The Casa DeMille was an upmarket spaghetti house. It was only later (much later) that I found out nine o'clock on Friday night was when it all began. It wasn't the first time they'd met, not exactly, but it was the first time she'd had a chance to talk to him properly, adult to adult as it were. If only I'd tried harder, I could have put a stop to it before it had even begun. If only I had destroyed the note - no one need ever have known. There were many 'if onlys'. In the days and nights to come I would be replaying them ceaselessly in my head.
And now I could hear myself saying, 'Yes, but we can still be friends.'
He looked embarrassed. 'Dora, it's finished. I feel really bad about it.'
I reached across the table and squeezed his hand. He started to pull away, then thought better of it. 'When I say friends, I mean friends,' I babbled, 'no strings attached.' The words tumbled out. I was surprised at how easy it was. 'There's no point in us going on if you're in love with someone else. But I don't see why we shouldn't see each other again.'
He looked doubtful. I was no longer of any interest to him, and now all he wanted to do was extricate himself as tactfully as he could. But still I ploughed on. 'I mean, I never thought we were going to get married or anything. But I don't see why we can't meet for lunch, and things. Unless of course you can't stand the sight of me...'
'Good God, Dora, no.' Oh no, Heaven forbid I should think something like that. 'But I wouldn't want to take advantage of you.'
But you already have taken advantage of me, I thought. He was sounding like a character from a Victorian novel. 'You couldn't take advantage of me if you tried,' I said in a flippant, slightly breathy way, my every word weighted with lightness. 'Of course, it goes without saying I'm immensely jealous of this person, whoever she is, and I wish you'd told me about her before.' And I paused, and added, 'What's she like?'
I'd caught him on the hop. He frowned, and for the first time I noticed that little crease between his eyebrows, the one that would get deeper over the years. For a moment or two, he looked as though he'd forgotten what we were talking about. 'You mean Violet?'
'Is that her name?' I asked ingenuously. 'How unusual.'
'I don't think it's her real name, but it's what she calls herself.' He looked at me pleadingly. 'I never intended to fall in love.'
I couldn't think of anything to say to that. Haltingly, in order to fill the ghastly silenc
e, he told me what he knew, which wasn't much, though I gathered they'd already spent an entire weekend in each other's company. So much for the sick uncle. By the time we'd finished our third cup of coffee, and he'd pecked me goodbye on the cheek, and we'd parted to go our separate ways, I'd formed a clearer picture of what I was up against.
She called herself Violet Westron because her real name was too difficult to pronounce - she was part-Czech, or part-Romanian, or part-Russian, he wasn't sure which. She was fluent in several different languages, including English. She had once been a singer, but she'd got fed up with it and retired. She'd told him she'd been around - she'd spent time in Prague, and Paris, and Berlin, and she knew Venice like the back of her hand. She'd had affairs with one or two famous artists and musicians, and even with a head of state, but she was cagey about their names. She let slip she'd once had her portrait painted by Fernand Khnopff, a painter whose name sounded vaguely familiar, though he wasn't what you'd call a household name. She'd appeared in a couple of films by a well-known German director, though when Duncan had demanded to know which one she'd shaken her head and laughed. It was almost certain all the prints had been destroyed, she'd said, and she thanked the Lord for that.
I said she sounded like a busy little bee.
She wasn't enormously wealthy, Duncan reckoned, but she had resources. He couldn't tell whether it was a wealthy patron, or an employer, or an ex-lover, but there was definitely someone in the background who was bankrolling her expensive taste in clothes. She had come to London in order to set up some sort of business deal, but when Duncan had pressed her further she'd laughed again and changed the subject. He'd asked how long she would be staying, and she'd said, 'For as long as it takes.'