The Art School Dance (43 page)

*

It was the
following morning, when those fine artists who were sober enough
and brave enough gathered in the painting studio for the customary
end of term assessment of their work. Barney, conducting the
assessment, had been at the exhibition the previous night and must
have had a skinful, for he was in a particularly venomous mood.

‘
Right,’
he said to the students assembled in a semi-circle before him,
going quickly from one to the other as if it was a game of clock
golf. ‘We’ll begin with McCready, who I have now come to see relies
too much on lucky inspirations and not enough on reasoned industry,
move on to Ceri who’s not done much work but thinks he’s excused on
account of the fact that he broke his leg. That’s no excuse, Ceri.
Don’t get so pissed in future and you might fare a little better.
You are not Jackson Pollock. I know how much you admire then man,
but that’s no reason to end up like him.’

‘
Famous?’ said Ceri.

‘
Dead,’
said Barney, and shook his head sadly. ‘Grow up a bit, Ceri. That’s
the best advice I can give you.’ He moved on. ‘Rose, your sensory
deprivation centre does nothing for me-’

‘
But
that’s the whole idea of the thing,’ she protested.

‘
-and as
for those stupid plaster casts, all they succeeded in doing was
upsetting Teacher. You’re lucky you didn’t end up in a plaster cast
yourself.’

He moved on,
systematically destroying the work of everyone present.

‘
What
about my work?’ asks Griff, when Barney eventually fell silent.
‘Haven’t you got anything to say about my work?’

Barney looked
at the notes he had been consulting, then flung them in the air.
‘Fucking hell, Griff! Need I say more?’

‘
That’s
it? That’s all you can offer? Well thanks a lot!’ said Griff,
standing and ready to leave.

‘
Very
well then Griff, if you really want me to be honest, all I can say
is that your work’s so outdated that it’s positively petrified.
It’s sugary, sentimental, so full of schmaltz that it makes me want
to puke.’

‘
You
mean it talks about feelings?’

‘
I mean
it talks double Dutch. It says nothing to me, Griff, and that’s an
end to it as far as I’m concerned.’

‘
What
you mean is that you can’t understand it,’ Griff accused Barney.
‘There’s no room for feeling in your life, is there? And that’s
what we’re talking about here, not sentiment, but feeling,
compassion, emotion.’

‘
It’s
all been done,’ said Barney.

‘
And it
can’t be done again? Don’t you think that there’ll always be people
who feel and love and cry?’

‘
No
doubt there will, but there’s no room for them in art.’

‘
No!’
said Griff, backing towards the door. ‘What you mean is there’s no
place for these things in your life! There’s no place for them
there because there’s no soul there! You’re a fucking desert,
Barney! An emotional desert! All I can say is God help your poor
fucking family!’

Chapter
Twelve

If Griff was
insanely in love with me, his emotions in turmoil, then McCready
was for the moment intemperately ignorant of me, his drunkenness
escalating as the end of term drew closer.

There were
lots of excuses for getting drunk during that last week of term,
little reason to do any work. Those friends who were our
contemporaries would not be seen for another three months, they
would all disperse, some to work and grub for money while others
might roam the continent with a backpack; those older friends who
were in their final year we might never see again, there were
goodbyes to say to them, boozy ones.

‘
No, I’m
not drunk,’ McCready said, before I could ask him, though he had
been drinking, and I could only hope that he hadn’t supped so much
as to make him troublesome or moody.

We were going
to a small party at Edith Billington’s, before moving on to the art
school dance, and I was keen that he should behave himself.

I was at the
wardrobe, searching for something to wear.

‘
Do you
think this is alright?’ I asked, wriggling into a long white dress,
its hem of crocheted lace reaching down to my calves. I took a
straw bonnet from the top of the wardrobe and held it on my head,
my other hand resting on my hip. I had once posed just like this,
in just the same outfit, beside my oil lamp, while McCready took a
photograph of me, the soft light throwing my face into chiaroscuro
shadows. I supposed that the memory had escaped him, though; most
probably the photograph was lost, forgotten like the oil
lamp.

‘
Perfect,’ he said.

The dress had
a Victorian look about it, the material had the texture of
untreated canvas, and the scalloped collar, which should have been
fastened to the neck, I had left open at the front. Walking along
the street to Edith’s house -her house just far enough away from
ours to make it a middle class home rather than a student’s
in-between place- the sun was low, had not quite set, and its rays
hit my bared neck, making my skin glow like sand on a beach.

McCready
surprised me by saying that I looked beautiful. ‘Gold skin, pale
hair, white dress. It’s all too much.’

‘
You
must
be drunk!’
I laughed.

Edith’s house
is a bit of a mess, she had only just moved in, but once she had
greeted us and taken us on a brief tour I was able to see the
potential of the place, appreciate the plans she had for it.

‘
It’ll
look quite nice when it’s finished, won’t it?’ I said to
McCready.

‘
It
will,’ he said. ‘The sort of place we could one day end up
with.’

Could we? Was
he divining what the future might hold for us? It was not what I
expected of him; it was more what he might expect of me. I was the
female, after all, the practical one more able to bring dreams to
fulfilment. The notion disturbed me for some reason, I gave
McCready an encouraging smile -yes, dreams are fine, but not just
at the moment please- and wandered off, spoke to some other people
about other matters, behaved as one should at such a party.

There was much
discussion about culture and Cocteau and Jean Luc Goddard, it was
that sort of gathering, genuine interest sometimes spoiled by
pretentiousness, and though I was not all that much taken with it
myself I was not quite so troubled as McCready was. He sidled
unsteadily up to Edith as she was telling someone about the pate
she had served to us. Okay, it was a wonder that the woman could be
so lyrical about pate, and it was only with an effort that I could
keep the interested smile on my face…. but still… McCready….

‘
Balls
to your pate and get me some meat paste!’ he blurted out, at the
top of his voice, and a dozen different conversations came to an
abrupt halt.

He spat a
khaki-brown mouthful of chicken pate into his glass and scowled at
the people who stared; this was his way, when he was drunk, to be
disgusting and aggressive.

In the stylish
manner which a certain class of people have, conversations were
picked up again so easily, like tatty little scraps which were
found in the gutter. That same class of people were used to pate
and had grown up with it, but McCready hadn’t; he still cherished
memories of salmon spread and beef paste and the sore thumbs he got
from trying to prise the lids off the chunky white jars.

‘
The
wine’s fucking awful too!’ he grumbled.

‘
McCready!’ I hissed, out of embarrassment and annoyance,
and Griff crossed over to us, thinking to distract McCready before
he realised that it was Riesling he was drinking and not Sweet
Australian White.

‘
It’s
alright, Virginia,’ he said. ‘I’ll get him out of here. You stay
and make his apologies.’

Again?

Griff smiles
at me, as if I should be grateful for the favour. McCready looked
at me, but could think of nothing to say.

‘
Go on,
I’ll see you later in college,’ I told him, with no hint of
emotion.

‘
I….’

‘
Come
on, McCready,’ Griff urged. ‘Let’s you and me leave these sherry
sippers and get ourselves a proper drink.’

Griff sounded
drunk himself, though everyone but McCready could guess that he was
not; he was laying it on, persuading McCready to leave, and he
grinned and winked at people as they walked to the door, his arm
around his friend’s shoulder to show that everything was under
control.

So clever, I
thought, so noble, so annoyingly interfering.

*

Barney, who had
been standing close by when McCready threw his tantrum, showed
neither disgust nor delight with his student’s behaviour; it was an
outburst of emotion, an exhibition of feeling, and so was not
worthy of analysis. It was left to his wife, who I had never met
before but who now introduced herself, to offer her opinions and
commiserations.

‘
It’s
the artistic temperament,’ she advised me, resting her fingertips
as delicately as she could on my arm. ‘Barney’s just the same at
times.’

Barney
scowled, refusing to accept that temperament could ever be related
to his art.

The hand which
had been on mine now rested on his with the same reassurance. ‘It’s
alright, dear, I won’t embarrass you,’ she said. ‘I’m just pointing
out to Virginia here that all you artists have your moods.’

‘
I
realise that,’ I said. ‘I suppose I have my moments
too.’

Though for the
life of me I couldn’t remember any as extreme as McCready’s.

‘
We all
do, but we weather through, eh?’ said Barney’s wife.

‘
We try
to,’ I agreed, smiling, though I resented the camaraderie which was
being taken for granted, the ‘all girls together’
intimacy.

‘
McCready seems like a nice enough young man.’

‘
You
don’t know him,’ Barney pointed out.

‘
But
I’ve heard enough about him from you,’ his wife said, and turned to
me. ‘If he’s been able to put up with my husband and his fanciful
notions of art for so long then he can’t be all bad. Any mood is
understandable when a person has been in contact with my husband
for too long.’

Barney
groaned, then excused the sound as a sign of hunger and walked off,
heading for the kitchen.

‘
You
see?’ his wife smiled. ‘He’s no better than McCready. No worse,
either. They all demand patience of us.’ She checked on the
direction her husband had taken, satisfied herself as to his
whereabouts, reminded me again. ‘It’s patience that’s required of
us. Remember that.’

To keep my man
happy I was to understand his moods, and I understood his moods
because keeping him happy was my prime concern? Was it duty, then,
rather than love? I wondered what it was that Barney’s wife felt,
thanked her for her ill-received advice and stood with her in
silence, surveying the crowd until her husband returned.

‘
Bobby’s
here,’ Barney told his wife. ‘Let’s mingle.’

‘
Your
Yankee colleague? Where?’ she asked, straining her neck to see over
the mass of heads. ‘I must meet her.’

‘
Why?’

To see if
she’s as bad as you make her out to be.’ She asked me, ‘Do you know
here, Virginia? Is she like Barney says?’

‘
I
really couldn’t say,’ I answered.

‘
She is,
believe me,’ Barney insisted.

‘
Well I
think I’ll make up my own mind,’ his wife said,
determined.

‘
If you
must,’ Barney shrugged, and the three of us waited as Bobby
approached.

I was quite
impressed, then, by the social graces and polite airs of Barney’s
wife; she was friendly without being fawning and this seemed to
bring out the best in Bobby, whose manner was equally smooth. So
smooth, in fact, that it could be imagined that all Barney’s
accounts of her had been no more than fabrications.

‘
Bobby,
this is Julia my wife. Julia, Bobby,’ said Barney, introducing the
two women, and this was all he was permitted to say, for then he
was cast aside while they became acquainted. Only occasionally
would one or the other bring him into the conversation, letting
slip some reference to college or an opinion of some member of
staff who was at the gathering. To all intents and purposes he
might not have been there.

‘
Another
drink, Virginia?’ he said to me.

‘
Thanks,’ I agreed, and walked through to the kitchen with
him.

Edith was
there, prim in a floral summer dress, and her wicked smile seemed
quite out of character.

‘
Too
much for you to take, is it?’ she said to him.

‘
What?’
he asked, pouring drinks for the two of us.

‘
Your
wife and your mistress together, comparing notes.’

Barney looked
at me and I tactfully turned my head, smiling, it had nothing to do
with me. Then he said, ‘Oh piss off Edith.’

‘
Men!’
Edith grinned delightedly, turning on her heels and flouncing
off.

‘
And
what does she know about men?’ Barney grumbled, glaring after her.
‘I doubt she’s ever had one.’ He passed me my glass of wine, said,
‘You know, Virginia, I feel like getting really smashed tonight.
Not so smashed that I make a fool of myself, like McCready. Just
pleasantly pissed.’