The Mistressclass

by Michèle Roberts

  Back upstairs he took another shot of vodka and sighed. The pain was dulling, and his limbs were pleasantly weak. He stumbled across the room, kicked off his shoes, lay down on the sofa, banged his head onto the cushion, and fell asleep. He dreamed he was a boy again, back in the house in France, watching Robert dance with a girl with a black hood over her head, slits cut in it for eyes. They polkaed out of the studio, into the garden. The girl seated herself on a swing hung over the wild long grass and Robert pushed her. She was plump and fresh as a little flirt by Fragonard. Kicking out her arched feet in beribboned high heels. Laughing. Her skirts flew up, blew backwards over her thighs, showing off her neat cunt.

  The house was empty and fragile as a pierced and drained eggshell. He floated through it, his feet off the ground; he drifted up and down the stairs like wreathing mist. He knew he was dead. He was a ghost, at liberty to pass through walls, enter whatever rooms he chose, sleep in whatever bed took his fancy. Robert was a ghost too. They wandered together, looking for somewhere to lie down and rest.

  When he awoke it was early afternoon. He felt very sick. He lurched into the bathroom and threw up. Then he showered and cleaned his teeth. He got himself downstairs, gulped a pint of water from the tap. He lay on the sofa in the sitting-room and watched an old film on television. At five o’clock he went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. Catherine’s plate of uneaten breakfast reproached him from the table. He shovelled the mess of eggs and toast into the bin. She’d left her laptop on top of a pile of papers, next to a clear Perspex box of disks. He glanced at the label on the foremost one. Angels in Corsets. Presumably research notes for her Victorian literature class. Middlemarch, perhaps. Or something on women characters in Dickens. On impulse he sat down at the table, switched on the laptop, flicked through the box of disks. Odd titles. Lessons in Restraint. The Discipline Exercise. He ought to take more of an interest in Catherine’s teaching. She acted as his unofficial editor, read and discussed everything he wrote. He ought to give more back. He selected a disk called Beaten, and began to read.

  Just as he was finishing the washing-up he heard Catherine’s key in the door. She came into the kitchen clutching a paper-wrapped cone of red and pink carnations and green ferns, a plastic bag bulky with shopping.

  She jerked her chin towards the flowers held under her arm.

  —For you. I got the papers as well.

  She put her burdens down on the table. A roll of lavatory paper fell out of the carrier, a jar of instant coffee. She picked up the garish bouquet and held it out. He took it from her.

  He loathed carnations. These were frilly as tutus. Cherry-red and sugar-pink; their green stems waxy as candied angelica. People wore them as cheap button-holes for weddings. He and Catherine had married in a register office, and he had forbidden flowers, all similar nonsense like confetti and tiered cakes. At the last minute he’d relented, and allowed her to accept the bunch of lily-of-the-valley that Vinny had run out to buy.

  —I went to the garage on Holloway Road for the shopping, Catherine said: nowhere else was open.

  He placed the flowers, still in their paper sheath, on top of the fridge. He gazed around.

  —Where do we keep vases?

  Catherine was looking at him. Wary. Checking for possible danger signs. Adam felt as though he were very ancient, made of stone, a stone man left outside all winter long, streaks of moss greening his shoulders, the rain beating against his back. A stone sentinel in a park, tall hedge of close-clipped yew at his back. He was scoured white by the weather. His nose was eroded, his fingertips, his toes. A stone man couldn’t do what was required of husbands. Talk. Sort things out. He could only bend down and fill his mouth with earth. He wanted to go back to bed and sleep forever.

  Catherine seemed like a person in disguise. Was she really his wife? She had such a blank, polite face. She was a writer of sado-masochistic feminine crap. She was merely acting loving him. She opened her arms, walked forwards, hugged him. He put his arms around her, stiffly.

  —Sorry I was so cross, she said.

  She was clinging to him. He forced his lips to move.

  —I’m sorry too. I was a bastard.

  —It was me, Catherine said: I was being stupid.

  He sighed. The lid was back on the box. He hadn’t the energy to confront her with what he’d read. Let her keep her pathetic shitty secret.

  —I rang Vinny too, he said: she told me you’d rung her. You shouldn’t have asked her to go to the house before I’d said yes. Why couldn’t you wait until I’d thought about it?

  She tightened her grip. She laid her face against his shoulder.

  —We seem to be going through such a horrible time. I just want us to be happy again. With Robert’s show coming up, I want everything to be sorted out.

  He patted her carefully, as though she might break. Perhaps she was stone too. A stone woman. Two toppling people of stone, propping each other up.

  Catherine moved out of his embrace. She picked up the carnations, took a vase off the dresser, thrust the flowers into water.

  —How was the festival? he asked.

  —Good. I stayed to watch a bit of Hamlet done outside the National Theatre. Perhaps that effigy you saw was part of a rehearsal for Ophelia.

  He hadn’t told her Vinny had made the effigy, that he’d stood with her at Queenhythe and watched it drift away, wrenched free of the raft, further downstream, making for Greenwich and the open sea. He imagined Vinny wouldn’t have mentioned it. Self-protection. Catherine had little time for playfulness. She had not a lot of patience for what she described as Vinny’s nonsense. She didn’t like to think of artists as having a necessary childish streak. All very well for them! Someone’s got to earn the housekeeping, bring up the children, clean the place, cook the food. When she was teaching, he knew that she stressed to her students that making real, beautiful literature was very hard work. It certainly did not involve messing about as though you were still in the sandpit. What a hypocrite she was, writing that rubbish porn at the same time. He’d caught her on several occasions, tapping away in the kitchen, when he came in from work, and she’d jumped up, blushing. She’d never shown him anything. Now he knew why.

  She brushed past him, holding the vase in both hands. He followed her into the sitting-room. He turned the television back on and threw himself down in front of it on the sofa. Catherine placed the vase of flowers on a mahogany side table, next to a Staffordshire shepherdess, a pile of books. He shifted his position, so that the carnations were out of view. He concentrated on the screen. He watched a game show. They ate supper in front of the television, seated together in silence. Catherine went to bed early. He sat on downstairs with a whisky. He listened to the house creak and grunt around him. As though it were grumbling under its breath, gathering its angry forces, determining to speak.

  * * *

  Adam found Monday a relief after Sunday. He’d always hated Sundays, the afternoons especially. Charlie was good to work for; let him do things in his own way, at his own speed.

  At three o’clock he downed tools. He kicked off his boots and unbuttoned his blue cotton overalls, faded from washing, shrugged them off. He’d had them for twenty years. They were soft, from long wear, and creased. They concertinaed down. He stepped out of them, and they fell, wrinkling into twin flattened paper lanterns, onto the concrete floor.

  —I’m off, he shouted up to Charlie.

  Charlie’s boots clattered down the stone stairs. Charlie’s big hand pushed open the heavy double doors and he came in. He was carrying a metal tape. Dust on his toecaps, cobwebs in his hair.

  —I’ve got to go over to the woodyard, Adam said: sort out that delivery.

  The job had gone smoothly up until now. The warehouse roof had been patched up; the roofers had gone. Adam had separated off a space behind the main gallery, to make Charlie’s office. Upstairs he had built walls of wooden screens, slatted in lengths of four by two, hung with nailed-up sheets of plasterboard, t
o make two good-sized studios that Charlie could rent out. Downstairs, where load-bearing and soundproofing were major issues, he had used breezeblock. The new spaces reminded him of the upstairs rooms in his father’s house in France: the same dazzling white smoothness. Charlie’s future office would double as a private showroom where he could talk to interested clients. Adam was going to build storage racks, fitted with sliding doors, for prints and drawings, and a big sweep of desk and display cabinets. The first batch of MDF he had ordered, ready for starting later that week, had not arrived. A good excuse for leaving.

  Charlie was blowing his nose, wiping dust off his face with his handkerchief.

  —Shall we have a quick drink later, talk about the show? Or are you off home after the woodyard?

  —Another time, Adam said: maybe tomorrow.

  He sat down on a packing-case and bent to pull his boots back on. He yanked them hard over his thick socks. Boots were no protection. His anger at Catherine felt too close to home. The ground under his feet, baked hard after a long draught, was suddenly cracking and breaking up. You thought you were in your own garden, neatly fenced in, safe, but now, inside your barriers, the earth sank away, collapsed. An enormous parched mouth opening to snatch at you. Don’t fall into that trap. Speechlessness saved you. That way you did not betray weakness but stayed in control.

  He donned his tweed jacket. Old and shapeless, it fell round him. He said goodbye to Charlie and departed.

  From the woodyard behind Borough High Street he drove north. He left the car in the Safeway car-park off Holloway Road and walked back a couple of hundred yards, just past the railway bridge and the tube. He was due to meet Vinny in the Flora café, his favourite greasy spoon. This was where he used to eat lunchtime fry-ups sometimes in pre-Charlie days, when he was writing at home and needed to get out of the house.

  He liked the Flora precisely because it wasn’t fancy; wasn’t owned by an American chain. If you wanted coffee it came hissing and spluttering out of an ancient machine; shot into your cup bitter and sludgy and black. To eat you could have an English breakfast, or breadcrumbed escalope with spaghetti, or tinned soup, or meat dish of the day with mash. The Flora catered for locals, who nodded hello, then put their heads down and ate; left each other alone. Carlo cooked and Bettina served. She shouted the customers’ orders over the counter, and he shouted complaints back. Their duet rose and fell throughout the day; kitchen opera.

  The café walls were fitted with tongue-and-groove, the brown paint flaking and shabby, up to dado level. Above was wallpaper, beginning to curl at its top edge. A lattice pattern in beige against a blue background, with the green leaves and curling tendrils of vines, spilling bunches of black grapes, twining in and out of the lattices. Here and there hung decorative 1950s soup-plates glazed dark blue, inset with circular photographs and edged with shells, from Italian seaside resorts. A window-sill bore a large cactus and a laminated Italian calendar showing St Peter’s. A phosphorescent statue of the Virgin was tucked in beside the till. The radio buzzed and chattered in a corner. Carlo’s big black frying-pan sputtered and spat. He was cooking strips of bacon, flipping the rashers over as they crinkled up and the rinds hardened from translucent to gold.

  It was raining outside, and the café was stuffy, two fan heaters blasting out scorched air. Smell of damp coats and perspiration as well as of crisping fat. Adam and Vinny sat at a table near the door, cups of tea in front of them on the blue and white checked plastic cloth. The nearby window was steamed up. Vinny drew on the wet glass with her forefinger. A glum face, mouth turned down.

  —That’s you, she said: what’s up? Are you thinking about Robert?

  Adam moved his shoulders inside his jacket. The thick tweed constricted him. He was much too hot. He took the jacket off and hung it over the back of his brown wooden chair.

  —Tell me about your day first, he said: what have you been doing?

  —Writing, Vinny said: the usual. I was finishing something so that later this afternoon I can get on with my packing. I’ve booked the ferry for France for tomorrow. No point hanging about.

  —You know we’re thinking of selling Les Deux Saintes, Adam said: once we’ve sorted out the pictures. We’ll need to start emptying the place. It’ll be in a real mess, Vinny. There’s a lot of clutter.

  —Are you sure you’re not rushing it, Vinny asked: selling the house so soon after Robert’s death? Shouldn’t you wait a bit?

  She hesitated.

  —You must have a lot of childhood memories associated with that house. Won’t it make you sad to get rid of it so quickly?

  Adam grimaced at her. Questions questions questions. There she sat, downy and expectant as a baby bird, all mouth, beak open, squawking. His duty, apparently, to fill her up with ribbed red-purple worms.

  Her words had jabbed him in the stomach. She wasn’t soft and baby-like at all. She had talons. With that beak of hers she was tearing him open. Poking his insides apart, pecking up pieces of gut. Just like children do. He used to collect up dead sparrow fledglings fallen from nests in the high gutter, give them funerals, bury them in the garden with crosses made from lollipop sticks. Then afterwards he dug them up and did post-mortems with a spent match, a penknife. Irresistible, the need to prod those thin, flopping necks, those skin-sac bellies, distended and greyish-pink. No feathers. They were hardly birds at all, which was what gave you permission to slit them apart. Bloody blackish goo. Disgust meant they were well dead, so kick them onto the metal coal shovel and tip them into the dustbin.

  —How long have I got? he asked: fifty minutes, isn’t it, the analytical hour?

  Vinny looked taken aback.

  —I didn’t mean to offend you.

  She was pink in the face. Nevertheless she returned to the attack.

  —Why is it if I ask you a personal question you think I’m prying? I’ve known you for twenty-seven years but you never speak about your childhood at all.

  —Well, Adam said: it’s all made up, memory, isn’t it? That’s the current wisdom, isn’t it? But if you really want to know, my memories of childhood are not brilliant. So I shan’t mind selling the house and getting rid of them. Not at all.

  Adam didn’t have anyone he could tell. Not as a child and not later on. He didn’t know that you could tell. Everything was private and nobody interfered. People punished children. Boys got hit all the time; it was normal. Adam admired the bad boys at primary school who tried to get away with as much mischief as they could, even when they knew they faced a walloping. He wasn’t brave enough.

  He went to the pantomime once with his parents. Peter Pan. You could tell immediately who the villain was, not just from the roll of drums announcing his entrance, but from his glittering eyes and elaborate black wig, his thin mouth under twirly black moustaches, and of course from the evil hook at the end of his arm. Whereas Robert was big and curly-haired and smiled a lot. He liked going to the races and the cinema, drinking, and being out with his friends. Experimenting in his paintings should have been enough: stretching women’s bodies into impossible postures, bending back their arms and legs like hairpins, corkscrewing their necks. That was art, its subject-matter not to be criticised. But he needed to twist real people about as well.

  Outside the house Adam’s parents were giants, tall as electricity pylons piercing the sky. Heads haloed in aeroplanes they reared up above you, lover of gravity, where you stumbled and tottered then collapsed in the grass. They shot out their steel arms, collected fierce energy from the thundery clouds, and directed it downwards. In their metal hands they clutched wire bouquets that crackled and snarled. They strode the land and might trample you underfoot if you stood up and came too close. Better not try to look into their faces. Their gaze was terrible, could turn you to stone; strike you blind.

  Parents were also dangerous back indoors because you could not be sure whether their power was turned on or off. If you put your fingers to the socket you might get a shock that would bounce you upside-do
wn across the room; might stun you and lay you out for dead. In their hands you might be held, safe, but you might be dropped. It depended. You did not control the switch. Other people pressed it up or down. Your father might press your mother’s switch and then stand back to watch her light up and glow, or flash into a glare and then explode.

  When the bough breaks the cradle will fall down will come baby cradle and all.

  The song sneaked into his head and sang itself without his wanting it, whether he was driving across town to Borough or talking to Charlie about shelf measurements or waiting to be served in the pub. The drop was always there, just beyond his feet, and the whirlwind might whip out at any moment to coil round the cradle, snatch the baby out, and toss it contemptuously into the abyss.

  Sometimes his mother was not an electricity pylon but a shy animal. A fox who hid in the undergrowth and could not be coaxed out. He tracked his mother on Sunday afternoons, in the calm space after tea and before supper. His father dozing, the room comfortably dim, curtains drawn, firelight and warmth. Adam could creep up on his mother then, hover in her shadow. Watch her withdraw into her own place. She touched her china collection and went to earth.

  She stooped, knelt in front of the cabinet, which looked like the building in that picture Robert had once shown him. It squatted, sturdy and pinnacled, in the corner of the sitting-room. In the picture the front had swung open like a dolls’-house door so that you could see in. Slice of interior sharp with dangly points, like a church. A white-faced girl with upraised hands, kneeling at a desk, looking scared, a winged man in a gold frock throwing flaming darts at her and burning up at the same time, a cat jumping away bristling and screeching. Topped with a carved roof like a bit of picture-frame. Adam’s mother looked as though she were praying. Then she sighed, twisted the gilt key, pulled open the glass door.

  Inside the cupboard lived her troop of little saints whom she loved, the figurines that glanced coolly back when you stared at them Monday to Saturday. They were all called donttouch. But they allowed his mother to approach on Sunday afternoons with Adam hovering at her side.