THE HARBOUR WAS JAY BLUE. Elsie and the other girls stood close together, in cold spring wind, gripping their drawing boards to their chests, Mary scanning the shore like a lighthouse beam, looking for a spot to plant her students.
She yanked on a watch jammed into her breast pocket as Jane arrived, out of breath, her arms full. She dropped her drawing board to stop and rearrange her packages. “I’m sorry I’m late. Look, isn’t this wonderful?” She rifled in one of her bags and pulled out an ugly white bodice with lacing up the sides. She cupped her hands over her breasts. “You tighten the laces and …” She pushed them flat.
Mary shoved her own bosom forward. “Jane, are you quite ready now to join the class?”
“Oh, one more thing.” Jane smiled, her pink gums and small white teeth showing all the way to the back molars. She pulled off her hat. “I got my hair cut!” Her hair hung blunt, just below her ears. The wind instantly picked it up and blew it like spider silk around her face. She pushed her hat on again. “No more pins.”
Elsie stared.
Mary smiled dismissively and strode off down the pier. Her long grey skirt fell straight to her ankles. Her hips were wide, but not fleshy. It was impossible to tell whether her body was soft or sinewy. Only her ankles, surprisingly delicate, showed above her black lace-up boots. These days Clare found herself secretly watching strangers, imagining what they looked like under their clothes. They had been drawing female models dressed in light draping for several weeks, mostly young women who Clare had seen walking to work in the alehouses by the docks. The men’s classes were allowed to draw the nude body, the studio windows covered in paper.
Mary found the students spots on the benches at the end of the pier. The wind sprinted across the water and flew up between the planks of the boardwalk. Clare pressed her left forearm over her paper to hold it down. She squinted. The harbour, studded with ships, stretched away in both directions. Some of the docks had been rebuilt but there were still many gaps in the skyline, where the sugar refinery, the foundry, and other waterfront buildings had collapsed in the explosion. Behind them to the west, the clutter of streets; in the other direction, the bay’s wide blue mouth, and a far headland, stiff with conifers, motionless in the distance, a forest of stone. Clare drew the line of the Dartmouth shore.
Mary peered over Clare’s shoulder. Holding her wide-brimmed hat to her head with one hand, she flapped her other one at the bay. “You can’t fit the whole world on a page!” She took a pencil from her pocket, let go of her hat, made a square with her hands, and peered through it. “Find a smaller scene.” Mary sketched in the rectangles quickly on Clare’s paper, each one a different view of the bay. “Think in small sketches before you decide on your final composition.” She started to go and then looked back at Clare. “It’s not our duty to faithfully reproduce what we see. The real artist makes us see even the simplest things in a new light. When we reproduce the external forms of nature, we must bring the light of our own thought upon it.” Her hat sailed off skyward and she set off after it down the pier.
They sketched until clouds blew in from the north, sowing thin rain over the city. By the time the students packed up, the sky had gone dark, and it began to pour.
They got back to the school, soaked to the skin, their drawings stuck to their boards.
“Come and dry out in the studio, girls. God knows what your parents would say if I sent you home in this condition,” Mary said.
Clare laid her wet drawings to dry beside Jane’s on a table.
“Really, what do you think? It’s marvellous, isn’t it?” Jane shook her head and wet strands stuck to her cheeks.
“I like the way you put the horizon at the bottom of the page.” Clare stared at Jane’s drawing. Elaborate cornices of clouds sculpted with light and shadow filled the sky. Clare felt the prick of jealousy.
“I mean my hair, you ninny. Mother’s going to have a fit. Look, why don’t you come with me?”
“With you where?” Clare stamped her wet, cold feet.
“Home with me!” Jane said. “For tea! You’re wet as a stray cat. You can dry out before you go wherever it is you go. Where is it you live anyway?”
JANE’S HOUSE WAS set back off the street and flanked by two magnolias. Stacked wings and extensions spread around the original structure, which was topped with a widow’s walk. A set of glossy black stairs led up to the wide porch.
A faded Persian runner carpeted the front hall. On one side, a grandfather clock with no hands ticked softly. On the other side, shells, stones, bones, feathers, and eggs jammed a Victorian curiosity cabinet. Jane grabbed Clare’s hand and hustled her down the hall and up a set of curving stairs.
She took Clare’s wet coat and hung it above the radiator. “Now your stockings.”
She held out her open palms.
Clare, sinking into a deep, wingback chair, hesitated. Jane peeled off her own stockings and threw them in a tangle on the floor. She leaned back on the bed, crossed her bare legs, and pulled a silver case out of her skirt pocket. Cigarettes. She lit one, tilted her head back, and blew smoke towards the ceiling. Her hair was drying fast and flew weightlessly away from her face as if there were unseen currents in the room. The heater banged three times, then hissed.
Jane looked at Clare. “Go ahead, take off your stockings.”
Clare rolled down her stockings. It did feel better to peel away the cold wool.
“Surely you don’t want to keep your wet skirt on?” Jane said. “Why don’t you just let it dry for a few minutes? It seems silly to be so modest when we have spent so much time drawing models.”
Clare laid her stockings on the heater. “I’m not used to undressing in front of others,” she said.
“Well, it’s something we all have to get used to if we’re ever to be married,” Jane said crisply.
Clare stepped out of her skirt and draped it beside her stockings. Then she picked up Jane’s stockings from the floor and laid them out.
“Do you have a beau?” Jane said.
Clare ran her hands over her cold thighs, feeling Leo’s hands. “My fiancé went missing in France two months ago,” she said shortly.
Jane blew another smoke ring. “Oh, that’s why we didn’t see you for a week.”
Clare regarded her bare legs, white as cod bellies.
“And why you always look so sad,” Jane added.
Clare jerked her gaze to Jane’s unreadable face. She’d thought she’d hidden her grief at art class. During those brief hours she was able to ignore it.
“Did you have relations with your fiancé before he left?” Jane balanced her cigarette in a glass dish on her bedside table, running her hands up and down her own legs.
Clare flushed. “Relations?”
“You know. Sex. Lots of girls did. If they were engaged.” She gripped her ankles and leaned towards Clare. “I would have. I’m dying to know what it feels like. I can’t wait for the men to come back.” Jane picked up her cigarette and fell back on the bed. She rubbed her other hand low on her belly. “Of course I know the sensations. But,” she watched her smoke rise, “it’s got to be different with a man.”
Sex wasn’t something anyone ever talked about to Clare. She would have liked to ask her mother, but Ada would be embarrassed by her questions and deeply shocked to know that Clare had slept with Leo.
Footsteps in the hall. “Jane, is that you?”
“No, Mother, it’s a robber in my bedroom.”
A slight woman appeared in the doorway, stooped, but looking very young. The same fine hair and invisible brows and lashes as Jane. She could have been her sister. She peered at Jane, then scanned the room vigilantly, talking in a half-dressed Clare, her eye patch, the drying clothes. Her eyes flicked back to her daughter and rested there.
Jane looked back gamely. “He stole Clare’s eye. And our clothing, too!” Jane threw back her head and laughed a tinkling laugh. “Mother, this is Clare. Clare, my mother, Mrs. Eleanor Biggs.”
/> Clare pulled a shawl draped on the arm of the chair over her bare thighs.
Mrs. Biggs smiled briefly, then looked back at Jane, her face strained.
“What on earth have you done to your hair?”
LATER, AS CLARE WAS LEAVING, she passed Jane’s mother in the garden. She had a small set of shears in one hand and a stout bundle of magnolia branches in the other. The rain had stopped and the sky was white behind muslin cloud. Mrs. Biggs’s hair, which in the light of Jane’s bedroom had looked blonde like Jane’s, was actually almost white. Close up, Clare saw her pale skin was scored with fine lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth.
“I hope you’re all dried out,” Mrs. Biggs said.
“Yes, thank you.”
The woman looked at her pensively. “Jane’s a bit …” she dropped her shears into her apron pocket, shifting the branches to her other arm, “impulsive at times. She’s been very good lately. I should say she’s been well lately.” The bud scales of the magnolia were covered in a silver pelt. “She has weak nerves. Sometimes …” Mrs. Biggs glanced up at the yellow curtains of the second floor room. “She gets overexcited. She won’t eat or sleep, she draws for days on end, or writes pages and pages of things that are … hard to understand. And when it’s over it takes a long time for her to come back to herself. I can’t help but worry.” She ran her hand over her hair, pushing a strand on her neck back into its pins. “I can’t help but think it might be starting again.” She looked away and said almost to herself, “The first signs are often small things.” Then she turned and climbed back up the wide black front steps.
Clare looked up at the curtained window before she walked home. The yellow curtains were open. Jane was standing there wearing only her chemise and bloomers. She smiled and waved the hand holding her cigarette, before the curtains closed abruptly.
31
THE BULLET HAD LODGED in Leo’s calf. The woman crouched beside him, breathing hard. “Ahh, merde, je suis desolé!”
“Yeah, well, je suis bloody shot in the leg!” Leo said, teeth gritted, trying to roll up the filthy hem of his trousers to get a look at the wound. He breathed ragged breaths.
The woman scrambled to her feet and picked up the gun.
He shot his hands up. “Don’t shoot! I’m a friend — friend — ami.”
She let the gun hang at her side and motioned for him to stand, flapping her hand towards the stone farmhouse. “La maison. Allez-y.” She held out her free arm for him to lean against her.
As they walked she muttered to herself, “Quelle catastrophe! Qu’allons nous faire?” She smelled of soap and smoke and fear. As they neared the rundown cottage, an older man’s face appeared, hovering anxiously at one of the small windows. He opened the door and he and the woman exchanged heated words in rapid French. The man took Leo in nervously.
“Papa,” the woman said.
“Je suis Canadien,” Leo repeated. Sweat was trickling down his forehead into his eyes. The deep throbbing, now a crosscut sawing pain, was making him sick.
They took him to a small back room, where they pulled the curtains and eased him down onto a single wooden bed with a crucifix over it. All the while the man’s verbal attack didn’t let up. Leo didn’t have the energy to try to decipher words. It was the first time he had lain on a bed for months. Despite the burning in his leg he sighed with pleasure.
The young woman disappeared for a moment and returned with a bowl of steaming water, which she set down on the bedside table. She nodded at her father and together the two of them pulled his woollen uniform pants off.
Leo was flooded with shame. Shame for his dirty underwear, his fleas, his scabs, and his mongrel thinness. For the stench rising off him in the room’s heat. The woman tied a strip of cloth tightly around his thigh and placed his foot on a pillow. She dipped another cloth into the hot water and sat on the edge of the bed mopping away blood. Then she took a small blue bottle from her apron and poured liquid from it into the wound.
Leo recoiled in agony, banging his head on the wooden headboard. The crucifix rattled against the white stucco wall.
“Pardon, monsieur,” the young woman said.
The old man shuffled to the kitchen and returned with a chipped cup. He held Leo’s head up and brought a strong spirit to Leo’s lips.
The young woman removed his shirt and washed his face and arms and chest. “Thank you,” he said. “Merci.” He fell into a fevered sleep. He woke to Clare at the foot of his bed, her long dark hair hanging around her face. She took a pair of scissors and cut the side-seams of his woollen underwear, pulling away first the front and then easing the back from under his buttocks. She dipped the cloth in the warm water and began washing him. He could feel himself becoming aroused. She got up from the bed, her hair still hanging over her face, pulled a blanket over his naked body, and left, closing the door softly behind her.
HE WOULD NOT REMEMBER the days that followed, only the light growing and fading through the drawn curtains, and the young woman coming and going. He would wake to the sawing burn, when she treated his leg. He drank what she offered him.
ONE AFTERNOON when he awoke, the old man was sitting in the corner of the room, passing something from one hand to another. Leo tried to prop himself up, but pain shot up his leg and he fell back on his pillow.
“Bonjour, monsieur,” the old man said. “Ça va?” He got up and put the object he had in his hand on the bedside table. “Votre coquille.”
The Cardium shell, still warm from the old Frenchman’s hands. It had been in Leo’s uniform pocket along with the photo of Clare. “It was for good luck,” Leo said.
The old man looked puzzled.
“Bonne chance,” Leo said, tapping the shell.
HER NAME WAS NATALIE. The old man’s — Lucien. Natalie spoke few words of English, mostly picked up from British troops over the last years. Lucien, whether from a lack of aptitude but more likely obstinacy, refused to speak any English at all. He would, instead, transmit his questions or comments via Natalie who would attempt to rephrase them, miming in French and broken English.
“Papa veut savoir, where you from?”
“I come from Nova Scotia, Canada.”
“De la Nouvelle-Écosse, au Canada, Papa.”
Lucien shook his head impatiently and spoke to her in French.
“No, from where you come here?”
After a few days of this kind of communication, Leo got across how he came to be in their barn and learned that earlier in the war the Germans had come through. They’d killed most of their animals and taken the fall harvest. The winter had been hard. Lucien stared down at his big hands in his lap when Natalie finished their story. She turned away and fell silent over her mending. She had pulled up her hair, baring the back of her neck. Leo wanted to place his hand on the esker of fine bones there.
32
“THIS IS ANGUS. He’ll be our model today,” Mary said, looking around the room, sternly, pre-empting any nervous giggles.
The man was in his early twenties, fair-haired, with pale, soft whiskers — still not able to grow a full beard. He walked with a limp and avoided eye contact with any of the women. Mary handed him a folded cloth and pointed him to a curtained-off corner. After a few minutes he stepped awkwardly into the room, naked except for the cloth wrapped in lumpy folds around his loins. Jane shot Clare a delighted smile.
“Short standing poses, please,” Mary said.
Angus looked at her uneasily.
“I’ll tell you when to move,” she said. “Just try to relax.” She whirled around to face the girls. “It’s foolish to think that a woman should only draw the female figure. Why on earth wouldn’t we also strive to master the male?”
The young man looked like a labourer, with thick arms and legs. The girls bowed their heads and began to draw. Clare drew and redrew, trying to make out the muscles braided under skin. When he turned she saw that the back of his left leg bore a long, deep scar.
Elsie, blush
ing deeply, took no more than fleeting glances, then stared down at her paper for long minutes.
“Elsie, you can hardly expect to draw something you refuse to look at,” Mary said.
She circled the room. “The body is not still life. It’s alive, and it is connected. See how this muscle runs up the front of the leg, the quadriceps. It doesn’t just end, it attaches. Here … you have to look.” She gestured towards the young man with frustration, strode across the room, and pulled at the cloth to expose that place where the muscle buried itself in the hip. Suddenly the whole cloth unravelled onto the floor.
There was a collective gasp. Elsie dropped her head and gazed at the floor. Jane stared hungrily. Angus covered his parts quickly with his hands. Mary looked at him with weary exasperation. “I’m sorry.”
While he collected the cloth, she faced the girls again. “If our artists look away, who will see for us? We’ll be forced to perceive the world through the eyes of others … will they be the ones to tell us what’s beautiful, what’s ugly?”
Elsie raised up her eyes to Mary’s.
“Don’t look at me. Look at our model.” Mary stepped away from Angus and extended an arm towards him. “He’s not a particular man. He is man — the ideal — he’s Michelangelo’s David, he’s Poseidon.”
Angus stood, the cloth still clutched in one hand, covering himself. Mary looked at him gently. “If you don’t mind, could you pose for us without that silly thing?”
“That’ll be a dollar extra,” he said in a hoarse voice, but let the cloth fall.
Clare stared with the others at the man’s groin. She had seen her father once, changing into his clothes behind a bush, after swimming in the river. She had seen the injured men, black with soot, their clothes blown off, lying in the corridor of Camp Hill Hospital. But she had only ever seen one healthy young man naked. And in the heat and rush of those brief moments with Leo, neither of them had had the chance to take a close look at each other. She’d imagined it in the night, running her hands over her own body, imagined their future with each other. But that was before. Now the thought of pleasure only opened grief. She’d stopped touching herself. She blinked back the tears, bent over her paper, began to draw the tender pink penis lying in its nest of dark hair.
Dazzle Patterns Page 19
