The Mistressclass

by Michèle Roberts

  She kept Catherine company at the station bookstall, flicking through fashion magazines. Pale models in skinny shifts. Blank-faced waifs dangling long matchstick limbs, splayed knock-kneed like puppets, toes turned in, huge panda eyes circled with black eyeliner, fringed with black false lashes. Looking as though they’d been abandoned, like lost luggage. Baby dolls waiting for someone to turn up and collect them. They made Vinny uneasy: they seemed so fragile, so vulnerable. The dead were safer. They were so innocent now they were at peace. They could no longer be hurt, and they could not hurt anybody either.

  —Can we go and look at Montparnasse cemetery? Vinny asked: the guidebook says it’s just round the corner.

  —No time, Catherine cried, checking her watch: our train’s in five minutes.

  Vinny’s clumpy sack slowed her progress through the elbowing crowd. It dragged at her legs from behind, brought her down, like a rugby tackle. Catherine seized a handle and towed her along, almost tripping. Shouting at her to hurry. They made the train steps with a minute to spare, hauling themselves up the steep little tier of black iron lace into the corridor. Into the first carriage they reached. Empty. They teetered in a muddle of bags, breathless and panting, Vinny grinning in triumph, Catherine still tense-faced. The whistle shrilled. Shouts from outside. The train jerked forward. They jolted, almost fell over. Then together they heaved the bags up onto the overhead rack, sat down. The train tick-tacked away, out into the concrete suburbs. Now Catherine could relax. Her shoulders unclenched and she flopped against the shiny leatherette backrest.

  —We’ve done it, Vinny said.

  —Just, Catherine said.

  Vinny began ferreting in her shoulder-bag. She brought out bottles of Orangina, a bottle-opener, a packet of cigarettes. Catherine twisted round, knelt up on the seat, looked at her reflection. She fished out her comb and smoothed her hair. Vinny served them a bottle of Orangina each, lit up a Gitane. The rough taste hit the back of her throat, scorched its way into her lungs.

  The train rocked out into the countryside, striking south-west through cornfields. They swigged their sweet fizzy drinks, finished their cigarettes, yawned. Soon Catherine put her head on her arm and fell asleep.

  Half dozing, Vinny slipped away from being twenty-five, dissolved backwards. Became a baby again, held on Mum’s lap and jogged very gently up and down. How soothing this rhythm, and the clattering of wheels on rails, so regular that it lulled you into dreaminess, melted you into the landscape you were speeding through, the sun warm behind the window and the little serge curtain rough against your cheek.

  Up and down, up and down, up and down. She wanted never to stop but to go on forever, part of this flow of goodness and sweetness and bliss; she could have as much as she wanted; she was full of love and pleasure and sleep.

  Someone shook her by the shoulder.

  —Wake up. We’re nearly there.

  She struggled awake. Tears wanted to spill. Mum was dead. Green sleep-grit to be knuckled from under her eyelids, hands sticky with heat and sweat. Her hair felt dirty.

  By the time they halted in Sainte-Madeleine Vinny had had enough of trains.

  She saw Adam immediately, at the other side of the booking-hall. He was just coming in through the far door with an older man who must be his father. Tall and stocky, with curly fair hair and piercingly bright eyes. Dressed in blue denim jacket and trousers.

  Adam saw them and turned. He was unsmiling, tense. He hesitated, said something to his father, then came towards them.

  Robert had one arm around her waist and one around Catherine’s. He was kissing them, swivelling his mouth from side to side to plant smackers on their cheeks. Vinny and Catherine twisted in his embrace, trying to dodge. Adam looked on. Then he came forward and reached for Vinny’s bag.

  —Hi, Vinny, he said.

  —Hi, Adam, she replied.

  Robert tightened his grip on Catherine, and she subsided. She smiled at him weakly and politely. She turned her head and sent Vinny a sardonic look.

  —Come on, darlings, Robert said: car’s just outside.

  * * *

  Robert’s house was called Les Deux Saintes. The four of them lived together in it for five weeks. At first Vinny thought it was like being in a commune. Soon she saw that this comparison was false. In a commune everybody was supposedly equal, whatever hierarchies rippled underneath that flat surface; whoever dominated in secret while pretending not to. But Robert made no fake display of democracy: he was definitely king of his castle, the rest of them dirty rascals. So then she thought: it’s like having a second go at a family.

  A fairytale one. The setting was out of those stories she’d devoured in childhood: the isolated house half-way up the hill, not quite the poor woodcutter’s shack, but certainly on the edge of the forest, and plain enough. No wicked stepmother to be seen: the last applicant for the post had apparently been chased off onto the train for Paris. But present were the two resourceful motherless girls, herself and Catherine, the prince in disguise, Adam, all appropriately dressed in colourful and becoming rags, and the giant who could obviously be a bit of an ogre, Robert. Or are Cath and I the ugly sisters? Probably.

  Her host further conformed to the archetype by preferring to live in his own, separate world, with his own customs and rituals. He took no part in the French country life going on around him. He had deliberately chosen the house, he explained over dinner the first night, because it was four kilometres outside the village and sufficiently distant from the nearest neighbours, the Beauvins in the farm down the road, for them not to bother him. Peace and quiet for his work, no having to waste time on people with whom he had nothing in common. His painting was all that mattered.

  —And your love affairs, Adam muttered.

  Adam had produced a spinach lasagne, the layers of pasta thin and light, the béchamel sauce flavoured with pepper and nutmeg and bay. When Catherine complimented him on it, Robert laughed.

  —Adam’s lasagne, that’s nothing, that’s the only thing he can make. Wait till you taste my moussaka tomorrow.

  Vinny wished she were sitting facing the fire, instead of having her back to it. Scorched on one side and chilled on the other. Firelight gave you something to concentrate on, like a friend’s face. Adam, seated diagonally across from her, didn’t speak to her or catch her eye. He seemed diminished, thin, next to his big, curly-haired father. Catherine had retreated into polite mode. Miss Nice. Adam and Robert jostled together, struggled to dominate the conversation. Sometimes silence, then suddenly they both burst out talking at once. The same jabber and confusion inside Vinny. She kept forgetting which glass was for water and which for wine and holding out the wrong one to be refilled. Robert was noticing everything. Judging her. Vinny worried: did you tear bread or cut it? Were you allowed butter on bread in France? Did you eat pasta holding your fork in your right hand, like a spoon? She couldn’t remember. The protocol mattered. A kind of magic spell, table manners. Get it right, the incantation, and it would let you escape unnoticed and unscathed. Elbows in, sit up straight, offer to pass the salt if you want it yourself. Then you became invisible.

  Logs crackled and hissed behind her, and from time to time she turned round and glanced at the flames dancing in their cave of smoke-blackened stone. The burning lengths of sawn pine smelt resinous, sweet. Catherine was just toying with her lasagne, she saw, picking at the vegetable filling and pushing the rest aside. Pasta was fattening. Vinny rested her fork on her plate and hurled down some more wine. She didn’t like it much. On her tongue it was warm and furry at first. Then came an aftertaste, thin like water, sharp, a hint of vinegar. The effect was useful, though. Blurriness, like a cotton-wool wall.

  Robert’s brown curls were burnished to gold in the harsh light cast by the bulb dangling overhead. The hairs on his forearms were golden too. He had rolled up his shirtsleeves and unbuttoned his collar as he warmed up. His face shone red with eating and drinking. He mopped up the last of his sauce with a piece of bread.r />
  —Not much chance of a love affair with you around, young puritan, he said to Adam: you’re delighted to say goodbye to all my girlfriends. You don’t give them a chance.

  —Most of them are stupid, that’s why, Adam said.

  Catherine kept her eyes on her plate, as though she were astonished people could talk this way in front of strangers. Vinny thought that that was the point: épater the little visiting bourgeoises, let them glimpse the true vie de bohème. She locked her feet around the legs of her chair, braced herself. She gulped mouthfuls of wine. Yet she was sure her face was a giveaway, pink and prim. She drained her glass, wincing as the acidity hit her stomach. Robert beckoned to Adam, jerking his chin towards the carafe. Obediently he poured them all more wine.

  —The neighbours will approve, anyway, Robert said: no loose women sunbathing naked after the painting class and scandalising the postman. Poor Michel, do you know he believes in hell? He told me so last week while I was signing for a parcel.

  Adam hesitated, then spoke hurriedly.

  —Everybody here’s a Catholic. It’s not their fault. That’s how they’ve been brought up. That’s just the way they are.

  —No, it was more than that, Robert said: it was some kind of threat, because I was in the middle of a painting and wouldn’t let him into the studio to have a look.

  Two small nudes decorated the wall opposite Vinny. Chalk pastels, pink and yellow smudged and rubbed together into flesh. Pneumatic women with tiny eyes, thighs swollen and tight like pork sausages. Luscious dolls who sprawled on divans, feet in the air as though they’d just fallen over. They had a comic and caricature air. Hapless girls with ridged gold curls and rosy cheeks.

  —Madame Beauvin looked in the other day, Adam reproved his father: when she brought us those eggs, she wasn’t shocked at all. She was interested.

  —Yes, and whose fault was it she was let in? Robert retorted: yours.

  Robert was obviously God up on a cloud surveying his creation, while the farmers round about were part of the background, tiny figures moving in a landscape like the peasants in a Nativity painting. He appreciated their being there; they rendered the countryside authentic; but their concerns were utterly remote from his. His son, on the other hand, he kept under close scrutiny, rapping out questions. Still messing about with live performances? Happenings or whatever you call them? Found a job yet? Just what d’you suppose you’re going to live on? God forbid any child of mine becomes an artist! Get out there and make some money!

  Adam hunched lower in his chair, scowling, eyes on his plate, and growled minimal responses. Vinny clenched her hands together in her lap. Adam turned to Catherine and asked her if she knew anything about gardening.

  He had shown them around earlier. The property was enclosed by walls of greenery, evergreen hedges that had shot up and not been cut for years. Adam recited the names: box, privet, yew. The overgrown garden, curling away from the house along the brow of the slope, brimmed with bulky bushes you had to force a way between. Vinny jumped when the ground just in front of her suddenly fissured: a grey-brown zigzag. A darting point of tongue; bunched scaliness that slithered out of the grass and lengthened, swift and sure; moved inexorably closer.

  —It’s OK, Adam reassured her: it’s only a grass-snake.

  Eventually she came to accept them. They wriggled to and fro, basked under bits of abandoned corrugated iron. If you disturbed them, for any reason, they undulated off, a muscular pour, rapid and alert. They had their own routes through the dandelions and thistles. The neglected garden belonged more to them, to the lizards and hedgehogs and toads, than to people. Its gravel paths had almost vanished under the grip of clover and couch. You made your own track through the nettles to find the end of the garden, past Robert’s studio in the converted barn and through a tangle of elders, bramble and wild cherry. Here, where the copse petered out into a thicket of broom, the wooden posts of a fallen wire fence, half hidden in the undergrowth, marked the boundary where the garden became part of the forest.

  Robert’s studio, the former barn, was wide and lofty, towering above all the other buildings. Compared to it the low house and its dependent sheds were a mere huddle, clustered together like a sow and her piglets.

  —The studio’s kept locked, Adam explained: when Dad’s not there. He doesn’t like us going in when he’s working, either.

  Behind the house, reaching up the hill to the forest, was the field where the owners had presumably once grazed their cows. Nowadays rampant blackberries, coiling like barbed wire, barriers thrusting ten feet high, prevented you entering. Other fields close to the house, belonging to neighbouring farmers, were well tended: neatly fenced, stocked with apple trees, dotted with munching cows. By contrast, most of Robert’s land remained defiantly untended. He had cleared part of it, scything a patch of weed-filled grass to make a rough lawn, digging and planting a potager in the orchard in front of the house. But sorting out the studio had had to come first. He had happily abandoned the larger part of the garden, letting nature take it back, wreathe around and over it until it resembled the overgrown parterre in Sleeping Beauty.

  The interior of the house was similarly like something out of a folk tale.

  —Oh, it’s lovely, Catherine said when she first entered it: I’ve never seen anything like this.

  The fermette was the opposite of the small suburban house in which they had grown up. It had no carpets, curtains or chintz covers, no frills or decoration, few machines or gadgets. It was a play-house for children, a pretend version of the real thing. It reminded Vinny of all the camps she’d ever made in the garden shed or the coal-hole or the wasteland near the park. This was an undemanding structure, this artist’s house, which apparently did not require to be daily attended to with dusters, hoovers, floor polishers, cans of beeswax, mops, carpet-cleaner, window-cleaner, lavatory-cleaner, bleach, bath-cleaner. As a result it shouldered a coat of dust, sported balls of grit and cobwebs in the corners, a thick layer of brown grease on the cooker. It wore this dishabille with a raffish and insouciant air.

  —What a pity, Catherine whispered to Vinny: not to look after it a bit better. What a shame to let it get so dirty.

  They were standing in the kitchen with Adam and Robert. A faint smell of mice hung in the air. The mottled blue and grey lino underfoot was grimy and sticky, dotted with crumbs and dead flies. The window was smeary, so that you couldn’t see out of it, and the window-sill was piled with unwashed dishes. Robert, catching the criticism, shrugged.

  —Feel free to clean up, darling, if you want to. I don’t notice dirt, myself.

  He flicked a glance at Catherine’s shining hair, her ironed T-shirt and jeans, her unscuffed sandals. He waved them towards the back door.

  —Adam can show you the bathroom. Such as it is. It’s outside, through there.

  On their second day Catherine asked Adam to drive her and Vinny into Sainte-Marthe, the local town.

  —Would that be all right? Can you borrow your father’s car?

  —Of course, Adam said.

  He was silent all the way into town. He drove fast along the narrow back roads, swearing when they met tractors coming the other way and he had to brake abruptly. Vinny was relieved when they entered Sainte-Marthe, joining a line of traffic snaking decorously past the gendarmerie, and had to slow down.

  —You two go and sightsee or whatever, Catherine said: I’ve got some shopping to do.

  —We’ll meet here at the café in an hour’s time, all right? Adam said.

  Catherine waved, and darted off. Adam turned to Vinny.

  —Come on, then.

  He strode along with his hands in his pockets, frowning, tossing minimal explanations over his shoulder. He hustled Vinny past Sainte-Marthe’s tourist attractions: the two streets of medieval houses, the brocante, the dolphin-adorned fountain in the main square, the war memorial, the covered market-place, and the basilica.

  Pushing open the nail-studded side door of the basilica she re-
entered her childhood. She paused in the nave, snuffing up the smell of damp stone and incense. Gothic vaults leaped towards each other high overhead. The paved floor was spattered with spots of coloured light. The enormous empty space bounded up, balanced fragile as eggshells, and the stained-glass windows tossed suns about like jugglers’ toys.

  An ugly modern altar had been set up on the near side of the choir stalls. An equally ugly crucifix dangled above it. She turned away quickly from these, preferring to dawdle with Adam along the curve of the apse, inspecting the side altars: a dead bishop in a glass case, a nineteenth-century booted and spurred Joan of Arc, nailed-up marble ex-voto tablets thanking Sainte Thérèse of Lisieux for her interventions.

  —I haven’t been into a church for years, Vinny said: though I was really into religion as a kid. Mass every Sunday, catechism classes, singing in the choir at school, the lot.

  —Yeah, I remember, you told me that before, Adam said: I suppose I was luckier because I never had to go. Except at school. Dad’s an atheist.

  He yawned.

  —Sorry, Vinny said: are you bored? Have you had enough? We can go now, if you like. I can always come back another time.

  —One last chapel, Adam said: in here. It’s the best one.

  He opened a small leather-padded door in the wall to the left of the main altar and ushered Vinny through into the chill dimness beyond. This was a Romanesque chapel, small and crouched, its vault frescoed with a majestic Christ in Judgement outlined in red. One long forefinger upraised; angels with scrolled wings and arched bare feet surrounding him, two on each side, bearing him up. Beneath him, on a lace-covered stand, behind a black iron grille, a throned figure of the Virgin was surrounded by vases of pink and red gladioli. She was ramrod upright and straight under flowing pleats; balanced her miniature son on her left arm and raised her right hand, which held a tiny cup, in blessing. Her crown, garments and hands were coated in silver, as was her child. Her dark, unsilvered face was severe and remote. On the near side of the grille, tall thin candles were stuck on wire spikes in tiers; a grid of points of light. A handwritten notice instructed you what candles cost and where to put your money in the slot.