‘Sorry,’ I say, and take the beef and hurry away.
‘WAIT!’ shouts Carlo through the hatch. ‘You have to serve it at the same time as the sea bass. Are you an imbecile?’
Susie comes up behind me.
‘No, she’s not. Leave her alone, she’s doing fine.’
‘Don’t you worry,’ she says. ‘It’s OK.’
‘I’ve got two more for that table.’
‘Don’t worry,’ she says, winking at me. ‘I’ll bring them through.’
I manage to get all my orders in, but then I collect some main courses that belong to someone else and serve them, so Carlo goes spare and starts banging on the hatch table.
How does he know they’re for another table?
How do I know?
The rest of the afternoon seems to be a blur of coming and going and shouting and Susie running about picking up all the orders that I can’t manage. When there is a lull I say to her, ‘Oh Susie, you’re a gem!’
‘S’alright darling, oh, if only someone else would say that to me!’
Mummy wants brandy and the nostril wants a whisky and soda so I go through to the bar with a tray.
‘Do they want them on the tab in here, or are they going to be put on the bill?’ says the barmaid.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, you’d better find out. We can’t be short at the end of the day.’
A man sitting at the bar whispers something incoherent into my neck.
‘Get off me!’ I say, pushing him away.
‘Oh,’ he groans, ‘be friendly, can’t you?’
She finishes putting the drinks on the tray. I lift it up and the man gets a hold of my buttock and squeezes it. I slam down the tray with the shock.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ says the barmaid. ‘You want to break my glasses?’
‘Don’t you dare do that to me!’ I snarl.
The man slams down his hand on the bar. ‘Can’t anyone get a drink round here?’
‘Well, tell me what you want?’ says the barmaid.
I pick up the tray and walk down the yellow corridor.
Outside the dining-room door, Susie’s lover has his leg in between hers and his hand up under her white shirt.
Susie is looking blissful.
I squeeze past them into the clattering chattering dining room.
At last everyone is ordering coffee and some tables are getting their bills. Susie is doing the adding up and the dining room begins to empty. When we’ve cleared away the cutlery and plates and glasses and wiped down the tables, Susie brings out the cash box and opens a bottle of white wine and all the waitresses sit down at the end of the long table and have a drink.
‘Oh, I don’t think I’ve got the hang of it,’ I say, putting the glass to my forehead. ‘I really don’t think I’m cut out for this job.’
‘You did fine,’ says Edna.
Susie shares out the tips. ‘You got good tips, though, Eve.’
I walk out into the cool air and take out the matchbox and for a few seconds the birds light up, then flicker and go out. I close the box and put it in my pocket and walk along the street with ringing in my ears.
Chapter 5
‘He should have told us we were meeting there, I could have got the 159 from Brixton all the way.’
‘Yes, instead of leaving a stupid note on the board.’
‘He must have left it on Friday.’
‘I thought we were going to Regent’s Park.’
‘That’s the painting project, and it’s not till next week.’
‘Better than the bloody National Gallery, all those boring old paintings.’
‘They’re not boring.’
‘No, they’re all Italian, I know.’
‘That’s got nothing to do with it.’
‘And there’ll be loads of people.’
We are walking towards the bus stop, with our bags of sketchbooks and charcoal. Karl is meeting us at the National Gallery for the drawing class.
We wait under the tree.
The 22 comes along the road and Rob and Bianca decide we’ll get it to Piccadilly and walk down the Haymarket. Cecile is busy looking in her bag, wondering if she’s left her purse behind. We climb up the stairs and sit in the seats at the front.
Bianca sits down beside me.
‘Hey, what was it like?’ she says. ‘Sunday lunch?’
‘Pretty horrible,’ I say.
‘I spoke to Susie, she said she liked you.’
‘Yes, I like Susie, but everyone else is so bad-tempered.’
‘Oh, it’s always like that in restaurants.’
‘And everyone’s having an affair with everyone else.’
‘Sounds fascinating!’
I shake my head.
‘Oh, tell me the gossip, what’s Susie’s boyfriend like?’
‘Revolting.’
Bianca laughs. ‘She says he’s really handsome.’
‘He’s having an affair right in front of his wife.’
Bianca shrugs. ‘Well, people do, you know.’
‘I didn’t like him.’
‘You are a bit of a prude.’
‘Maybe I am. I don’t know.’
I look out the window and watch the shops flashing past in clashing colours.
I close my eyes for a moment, so only the light and shadow flicker on my eyelids. When I woke up I just wanted to stay under the covers; lie in bed and be very still listening to the quiet, because it seemed like there was too much noise, and too much to feel.
‘Well, maybe you are an idealist,’ she says, thinking better of it.
‘Maybe that too,’ I say.
‘You have to live in the real world,’ she says.
‘I know I do.’
We clamber down the stairs and out into Piccadilly. People are gathered at the traffic lights and move along in a body. Cecile holds on to my coat through the crowds and we follow Bianca and Rob along the road, past restaurants and banks and cinemas and stairs going underground.
‘You’re a bit far away, Eve,’ says Cecile.
We walk along the grey street in silence for a while.
‘So you didn’t like the waitress job much?’
‘It was horrible, Ces.’
‘Why?’
‘Because everyone is so mean and I’m useless at it.’
We pass the Evening Standard news-stand and photographs of women crying over men killed in the war.
‘Don’t you think it’s all too much sometimes, Ces?’
A car door slams and two men begin shouting at each other in an alley.
‘Sometimes it’s all too much, don’t you think?’
Cecile nods. ‘Look, I know what you mean. I feel like that sometimes too.’
‘Everyone is so mean, I can’t stand it! And the thing is, Ces, you just have to feel it all.’
We pass a woman huddled in a doorway, holding on to a dog.
‘That’s why people paint, Eve, why they write music or sing or make films. Because they can’t stand it either.’
‘Is it?’ I say, feeling helpless.
I look up at the roofs of the buildings where the pigeons are flying and Cecile puts her hand in my arm and guides me along the street.
‘Don’t forget the good things,’ she says as we cross Trafalgar Square between the huge lions.
We walk up the stone steps and into the building. He said he’d meet us inside but Karl is nowhere to be seen.
‘Are we late?’ says Bianca.
‘It doesn’t matter, you know he’s just going to tell us how composition leads the eye round the painting and all that stuff. Come on, let’s find some paintings to draw,’ says Rob.
The floor squeaks as we walk through the galleries. The huge rooms are almost empty of people.
We walk past Titian and Goya, Velazquez and Rembrandt.
Cecile says Titian could make ugly people beautiful, he paints them with such tenderness, and Bianca tells us that the flesh c
olours are painted over green to make them glow like real skin.
We look at how Titian paints velvet and Goya paints brocade and Rembrandt’s portraits glow out of the darkness.
And Rob groans, ‘Old masters’ and Bianca says, ‘Idiota’ in an exasperated voice.
We look at the Duke of Wellington in his medals and pink sash, and Bianca starts calling Rob ‘Dona Isabella’ after Goya’s portrait, because of the resemblance.
We look at Van Gogh, and Cézanne, Monet and Pissarro.
‘Oh Evie, you’ll like this one!’ says Rob. ‘Montmartre, it’s like the one you did when the robber ran past.’
‘If only,’ I say, and the night glows in beautiful colours, reflected in the wet street.
We walk through the huge rooms on the creaking floorboards, looking at the centuries pass by in moments that are captured in layers of oil paint, depicting beautiful and wrinkled faces, naked bodies, light on water, landscapes, and sunflowers and holy families.
Bianca says she wants to draw The Baptism of Christ by Piero della Francesca, and Rob says, ‘Bianca, you are secretly religious!’ But Bianca says, no, she isn’t, she likes the man taking his clothes off behind John the Baptist.
Cecile says, ‘But d’you know he worked out the composition mathematically, and that’s why if you look at it, it makes you feel tranquil?’
Cecile says she’s going to try Philip of Spain’s brown and silver brocade, and Rob says she’ll go and draw Diana and Actaeon because the women have real bodies, instead of the spindly things you see in magazines.
Cecile changes her mind and decides on Van Gogh’s Long Grass with Butterflies in spite of Rob shaking her head, saying, ‘How are you going to copy all those grass stalks, Ces? You must be mad!’ and I walk back to The Baptism of Christ and draw the tranquil composition and it’s true it makes me feel more peaceful.
After the stillness of the pictures we come out into the bustling noise of traffic and rushing people. Someone is handing out leaflets for an anti-war march. Bombs are dropping across the page. The date is written in a fluorescent explosion.
As we walk across the square, the pigeons are flying all over the place, and the police have arrived because some men are fighting and there is blood on the pavement.
‘Eve, this is all you need!’ says Cecile, but I shrug, and smile at her, and we all catch different buses to go home.
I climb off the bus before home and walk down the street to the river. I cross the road on to the bridge.
I walk out into the middle of the bridge. Even the trees in the park look dirty.
The light has gone out of the sky and the evening is grey. I lean over and look into the water. It is dark green, and feels magnetic as though it is pulling me in, and I imagine falling.
A man walks towards me from the other direction. He has a long coat on but the sleeves are too short. He stands beside me and leans out over the water.
‘It’s bad, isn’t it?’ he says.
I can smell the alcohol and I feel sorry for him.
‘Life is bad,’ he says. ‘It’s rotten.’
I look into the dark water.
‘A person could be tempted to throw themselves in,’ he says.
‘I know,’ I say.
‘There’s not much to live for,’ he says.
‘No,’ I say.
‘Go on!’ he says. ‘Jump! I’d like to see the splash!’
I turn to him and he looks at me with mad eyes.
‘It’s extraordinary how quickly a person can go under!’ he says, ‘like he’s been grabbed by invisible hands.’ He fingers the air in front of my face.
‘No!’ I say. ‘No!’ as I walk backwards away from him. ‘No!’
I turn round and run back to the Embankment, and I can still hear him laughing even above the traffic noise. I don’t stop running till I’m two streets away from the river, and when I get home I write a list of things that are good about life.
Chapter 6
‘He might have been an angel,’ says Cecile. ‘You never know.’
We are sitting on two blocks of stone in the sculpture yard, while the other two roll out the paper.
It was Cecile’s idea to paint a picture together, but Bianca and Rob took over, and went to Green and Stone to buy the roll of Fabriano, and split it four ways so it cost £5.77 each.
‘He seemed more like a devil to me,’ I say, watching as Rob puts a tin of paint on one of the corners so it doesn’t roll up.
‘Are we using the whole roll, Rob?’ I call out.
She looks up. ‘Why not? Don’t you think?’
‘It’s just . . . it’s massive, all twenty-three feet!’
‘Liberating!’ she says
I shrug. ‘OK.’
‘Yes, but look what you were about to do!’ says Cecile.
‘I wasn’t going to throw myself in, Ces.’
‘But you were miserable enough to!’
‘Imagine how horrible that would be,’ I say.
Bianca is telling Rob to pull her end along a bit, so the rest of the roll isn’t in the shed. The day is sunny and their shadows fall across the white sunlit paper.
‘Loads of people do, you know. Maybe it’s comforting to join all the other people who’ve done it.’
‘I don’t know about comforting, Ces, sometimes you have funny ideas.’
‘Is that really what he said, about how quickly a person can go under?’
‘Yes, like they’d been grabbed by invisible hands! And I’m telling you he’d seen it, Ces, I’m sure he had. It gives me the shivers.’
‘So it should! Apparently someone was found in Wapping who’d jumped in, and they had shrimps coming out their eyes and their nose and their mouth.’
‘Oh Ces! Where d’you get these facts?
‘I read it in a book.’
‘You’re making it up.’
‘I’m not! It’s in the book, I’ll show you.’
‘Look, it’s ready,’ says Rob, the paper is rolled out. ‘Let’s go and get our stuff!’
We take the lift up to our studios and meet back in the lift with our boxes of materials.
Roberta has brought potatoes.
‘What are those for?’ says Bianca, pointing.
‘Printing,’ says Rob. ‘We do it with the kids.’
We take our baskets and boxes and bags through the sculpture department and outside into the yard to our huge piece of paper; six feet wide and twenty-three feet long.
We lay our materials out alongside the paper, on the ground. There are jars of acrylic, tubes of printing ink, rollers and brushes and squeezy bottles of poster paint. There is charcoal and oil pastels, oil sticks and chalk, and some silver aerosol car-spray that Mick had left over. Bianca has brought sheaves of gold and metallic paper, and Cecile some corrugated cardboard and the bits and pieces she picks up off the street for collage.
We have empty jars and buckets full of water, and plastic egg cartons for mixing the paint.
‘And if we don’t have every colour that exists,’ says Cecile, ‘we can make it!’
‘Well, I think we’ve got enough,’ says Rob.
It is a warm day and Bianca ties her hair up in an old piece of cloth and looks fetching, and takes her shoes off. We decide to copy her so we can walk across the paper and stand in the middle of it if we need to. The henna tattoos that have faded on our fingers are still bright on our legs, and I like watching the decorated feet walking over the white surface.
Roberta starts straight away, rolling a colour on to the white with a printing roller. Bianca crouches down and begins to smooth gold leaf on to the surface, and Cecile starts painting a big green labyrinth.
‘Don’t feel inhibited!’ says Rob, from the other end of the paper. ‘If it isn’t any good we can always go over it.’
‘Thanks,’ I say, sitting in front of the big white space.
‘I’m just saying,’ she says. ‘It’ll be easier when we get going.’
I try painting
a crow, but it looks lost on the empty paper, so it turns into a black oblong that might be a door, and I decide instead to paint nothing in particular.
The paper begins to fill up with colours and I move around the paper putting dots on to coloured shapes and tendrils in the spaces between. I forget myself as the painting begins to have its own life.
We move round and in and out of each other’s pieces of work, sometimes covering them or letting little parts of them show through, in layers of paint and collage. The colours are dark and light, ugly and beautiful, drab and glinting.
We become absorbed and silent, and sink into an exhilarated painting trance. Time stops passing and stands still, and in the long moment the picture moves and pulsates with spirals and curves, and explosions of dots.
The henna paintings on our legs get splashed too, as we walk across the paper, and seem to become part of the painting.
I watch Bianca as she crouches down on the paper, getting her knees covered in paint, printing faces and eyes and hands, with potatoes cut in half, and magenta and turquoise printing ink. Cecile’s huge flowers blossom in unexpected colours, and through them, and among them wind Rob’s mysterious pathways. She has brought her dried earth to mix with medium, so among the sprouting flowers some earth-caked women are squatting.
Suddenly I see something. I paint an undulating line that changes colour along the length of the painting, meandering between Rob and Bianca’s feet from one end to the other. It is the edge of the river, and the buildings and their reflection in the silver, sometimes copper, water.
‘It’s the river!’ shouts Cecile.
The picture has turned into the wildest painting of London you’ve ever seen. London with its ancient history, with fireworks, with its wild spirit and primeval beginnings, with fields of marigolds in Pall Mall and Mesolithic ancestors, and frenzied atmospheres and flashing neon, and places of unexpected pale blue peace. I paint Tower Bridge and Lambeth Palace and a flaming angel with jewelled eyes, and Bianca adds patches of different-coloured metallic sky.
Rob starts painting the outlines of buildings. Huge flowers are sprouting from Westminster, Big Ben is splashed with fluorescence and the outline of St Paul’s contains a labyrinth.
By the time we have finished, our feet and hands and knees are covered in paint. We have streaks on our faces and paint-spattered hair, as Bianca took to flicking fluorescent pink over the paper so the dots of light would glow on the dark colours.
Invisible River Page 17
