Unravelling

by Lindsay Stanberry-Flynn

  She settled herself at her workroom table and examined the pencils she’d sharpened last night in readiness. Her first drawings were always in black and white and she added colour later. She flexed her fingers and stared at the whiteness of the paper. She selected a pencil, a 2B. Her hand hovered over the page.

  Once she broke her fear, ideas streamed from her fingers. She had to keep stopping to brighten the point of the pencil, or to shift to a 2H, or a 7B. She applied different weight to the lines, the outline of the shoulders and the arms of the garment jumping dark and thick from the page, while lighter thinner lines suggested folds or pattern in the material. One of the jackets was fitted at the waist and flared down to the thigh. It had a high mandarin collar and the wide bell-shaped sleeves were caught in a cuff at the wrist.

  Footsteps overhead interrupted her concentration. The top storey of the house was mainly used for storage, but Gerald had taken to sleeping up there on an old battered sofa after working late. Since he’d lost his job at college four years ago, his world had become topsy-turvy, sleeping during the day, spending all night carving, chiselling, casting. His recent exhibition in Paris with its depiction of men as tortured etiolated figures was acclaimed as a sensitive portrayal of the existential angst characterising human experience in the twentieth century. But as the praise grew, so did his dissatisfaction with his work. When Vanessa went to his studio these days, there were empty bottles of whisky lined up on the floor.

  She heard him calling for her from the landing.

  ‘In here,’ she shouted back, her heart beating faster.

  She’d grown used to seeing him when he’d been working all night, but this was more than that. His hair was matted; circles the colour of mud stained the skin under his eyes and a tracery of red lines spotted his eyeballs.

  ‘Do you have to make all this noise?’ he demanded.

  ‘I’m not making any.’

  ‘There’s this thing for a start.’ He swaggered across the room, his head settling on his shoulders so that his neck seemed to disappear, and flicked the switch on the radio. Rod Stewart belting out You Wear It Well was silenced instantly. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Trying out some ideas.’ She clenched her hands together to stop herself covering the page. He was just behind her, his arm almost resting on her shoulder. She wrinkled her nose at the heavy smell of perspiration.

  ‘Clothes,’ he said.

  She listened to his breathing – laboured as if he’d run a long race. She imagined his nostrils flaring in thick fleshy curves in that way they did when he was angry. The jacket she’d been so pleased with looked ludicrous now.

  ‘Clothes,’ he said again. That one word spoke volumes.

  She twisted round and smiled up at him, remembering how the tutors at college had turned on anyone not able to stand up for their work. ‘Bollocks!’ one of them used to shout. ‘It’s all bollocks!’

  ‘I’m working on designs for jackets and waistcoats,’ she said. ‘I want to utilise the interest in ethnic clothing. I thought I’d approach some of the knitting pattern companies.’

  ‘What the hell are you doing wasting your talent on this shit?’

  She stood up. It was too easy for him to intimidate her if she was sitting down. She almost lost her nerve when she saw his flushed cheeks, the flecks of spit gathered at the corners of his mouth. ‘This shit is what I want to do. Clothes, textiles, design are as exciting to me as wood, stone and bronze are to you.’

  ‘You’re an artist, Nessa, not a bloody craftsman. Let people without talent sort out what we put on our backs. Your role is to interpret life, explore what it means to be a human being.’ He was waving his arms round, and she stepped back as she felt the energy springing from his voice, his eyes: his whole body quivering as he spoke.

  She wanted to agree. Tell him she was as ardent as he was. His face would transform from angry to loving in an instant, his arms would fold round her, he would kiss her, his tongue pushing teasingly against hers. ‘My darling one,’ he’d say, ‘I knew you’d see it my way.’

  Vanessa breathed in and pulled back her shoulders. She wouldn’t give in. She couldn’t let herself be submerged in his ideas, his passion. Who would she be? A picture of her daughter’s blue and yellow yo-yo, arcing down to the floor, climbing back up the string, appeared in her mind. Gerald was as skilful at manipulating her, making her dance to his demands, arguments, his intellectual bullying.

  ‘But surely as a sculptor, you’re a craftsman too.’

  ‘Spare me the lecture, Vanessa. What are you getting at?’

  ‘What I’m trying to say, if you stopped being so antagonistic and let me speak, is if I innovate and experiment with my designs, why shouldn’t I be an artist as well as a craftsman, like you’re a craftsman as well as an artist?’

  Gerald rolled his eyes towards the ceiling. ‘For Christ’s sake, Nessa, where have you got this trite twaddle from?’

  ‘It’s what I believe, Gerald. And if you weren’t so arrogant, you’d see my work – ’

  ‘Work?’

  Vanessa gestured to her drawing of a jacket.

  Gerald pounced on the sheet of paper. He thrust it up to her face. ‘You call this your work.’ He shook the paper and it rattled and thrashed in his grasp like a ship’s sail in a storm.

  Vanessa’s eyes tried to reconfigure the jacket, but the lines she’d drawn so carefully, exploiting every possible mark on the paper, leapt about and dissolved into a squiggly mess. The paper obscured his upper body, so that only his red face and bull-like neck were visible over the top. His lower lip jutted out, exposing its soft slug-like inside. Had she really fallen in love with this face?

  She heard a ripping sound and watched as Gerald tore the sheet down the middle. Her feet held her to the floor as he put the torn halves together and ripped again. She reached out to snatch the bits of paper. As she lunged, he let go. She staggered against the chair, one fragment clutched triumphantly in her hand, the other pieces fluttering to the floor.

  ‘Have your stupid drawing,’ he sneered. ‘I should have known you’d never get beyond some housewife who thinks dressmaking is art!’

  Vanessa woke up well past the time she was supposed to pick up the children from Lizzie’s. Sleeping in the afternoon had given her a headache – she hoped Lizzie wasn’t in one of her crusading moods. She felt flayed from Gerald’s criticism. After he slammed out of the house, she’d torn up her drawings and made a little pyre from them in the garden. She’d put a match to it and watched the brief burst of flame wither into charred fragments. She’d spent the rest of the day in bed.

  Lizzie’s house was a fifteen-minute walk away in Hampstead Lane. Her husband, Alan, was an advertising executive, and Lizzie had been his PA before they married. Their home was beautifully furnished, all cream sofas and carpets. Vanessa envied its immaculate state. Alan and Lizzie threw amazing parties and Vanessa and Gerald had been invited to one when the two women first met. Gerald drank too much and harangued another guest, who happened to be a Tory MP, for the lack of Government funding for the arts. This hadn’t bothered Lizzie, apart from the fact that she’d wanted to lobby the ‘pompous old prick’ herself on women’s rights, but Alan had been furious.

  Vanessa and Lizzie met several times a week for coffee. Sometimes when the children were at school or nursery, Vanessa would sketch Lizzie. She had the most wonderful face: high cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes, curving mouth. Lizzie bought one of the drawings for Alan’s birthday, and it hung above the fireplace in the sitting room.

  Apart from that, Lizzie didn’t share Vanessa’s interest in art. She spent all her free time working for the women’s liberation movement. She helped organise the first march in London, she talked on the phone about what she called ‘the twin evils’, male chauvinism and female oppression. The novel she’d told Vanessa she wanted to write had never materialised, and she was as scathing as Gerald about Vanessa’s dreams. ‘Knitting!’ she’d e
xclaimed. ‘Boring! Boring! Boring! How are we ever going to get anywhere if the likes of you, Vanessa, insist on knitting?’

  Vanessa realised she felt lonely. It was a long time since she’d had anyone to share her ideas with. She remembered lobbing ideas about art back and forth with Andrew. He was brilliant with watercolours, painting subtle gentle scenes, which insinuated their way into the mind. She could never talk to Gerald in the same way: he was forever the tutor and she the student.

  When Vanessa told Lizzie that she’d love to go to the Paris exhibition of contemporary art, Lizzie asked how many female artists were included. Vanessa didn’t know. ‘We’re at war, Vanessa,’ Lizzie said. ‘And no one’s going to fight for us, if we don’t.’ She lent Vanessa books: The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. Vanessa sat up late reading them while she waited for Gerald to come home, and the new information, opinions, concepts made her feel as if her brain had been in hibernation.

  Lizzie resented the fact that she had to stay at home while Alan was increasingly successful. She only ever wore black – ‘I’m in mourning for my independence’ – and complained about the lack of her own money.

  ‘But Alan gives you so much.’

  ‘Gives me, keeps me. I can’t even pay for my own tampons! Where does keeping me end and controlling me begin?’

  ‘Why did you have children when you resent giving up your career so much?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have to choose! Alan didn’t think: career or children, which shall I have? Men can have it all!’

  ‘Did you enjoy being a secretary?’

  ‘When I left school, there were two options.’ Lizzie counted out on her fingers. ‘One, I could be a shop assistant. Two, I could go into a typing pool. I chose typing and worked my way up. I practically ran that company. Half the time Alan didn’t know what was happening. Lizzie, what shall we do about this? Lizzie, what do you think about that?’

  ‘You’re really angry, aren’t you?’

  ‘Too right I am. The only reason I was the PA and not the managing director was because I haven’t got a penis.’

  Lizzie looked so fierce that Vanessa didn’t dare laugh. ‘Some women see homemaking as their careers,’ she began.

  ‘Social conditioning, Vanessa. Centuries of men having all the power. Do you really believe that the biological accident of gender should allow Gerald to become a successful sculptor, while you’re forced to bury yourself in housework and children?’

  ‘But Gerald’s far more talented – ’

  ‘There you go again,’ Lizzie said. ‘What chance have you had to develop your talent?’

  ‘It’s difficult with the children, and Gerald works irregular hours … ’

  Lizzie held her hands out, palms upward. ‘Precisely my point.’

  Cordelia and Esme ran to the front door when she arrived. She lifted Esme into her arms, breathing in the warm baby smell she still exuded. ‘Did you have a lovely time at nursery?’

  Cordelia pushed a painting she’d done at school into Vanessa’s hand. ‘It’s you and Daddy. Do you like it?’

  Vanessa looked at the two figures, one with spindly legs sticking out from a yellow mini skirt and with a halo of bright red hair. That must be her. The other figure was a round bulky shape with a mass of black hair standing out from his head and covering his chin and cheeks. The eyes on each face were torn-up fragments of black paper with sparkling glitter in the centres and the mouths were upturned red semi-circles. The figures were holding hands.

  The innocence of Cordelia’s image of her mummy and daddy made Vanessa want to cry. Big hot tears that would splash on to Lizzie’s tiled hallway and form a puddle round her feet like the tears in one of Cordelia’s story books. A man and a woman holding hands and smiling.

  ‘Do you like it, Mummy?’ Cordelia’s upturned face, her fingers clutching Vanessa’s jeans. ‘Mrs Joseph gave me a star.’

  Vanessa looked at the painting again. ‘Yes, darling, it’s pretty.’

  Her passion for Gerald had held her transfixed. A huge chunk of her life spent within that magical aura diffused by him. From his first criticism of her still life, he had obsessed her, enchanted her, intoxicated her, fascinated her, driven her mad with lust, with his arrogance, his swaggering belief in himself. The mountain of his personality, treacherous craggy slopes she exhausted herself exploring, dominated her landscape.

  ‘You’re here, Vanessa.’ Lizzie came into the hall. ‘I thought I heard voices. Have you had a productive day?’

  ‘Em … so-so.’

  ‘God, you look awful.’ Lizzie came towards her. ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  Lizzie took Esme from Vanessa’s arms. Esme set up a wail of protest. ‘I know,’ Lizzie said, taking Cordelia by the hand. ‘What about you two watching Magic Roundabout in the playroom with the others while Mummy and I have a cup of coffee?’

  For all her dislike of domesticity, Lizzie was far more efficient than Vanessa and soon had the children sitting in front of the television with orange juice and biscuits. She came back into the hall where Vanessa remained surrounded by her imaginary puddle of tears. She put her hands on Vanessa’s shoulders and pointed her towards the kitchen.

  Vanessa perched on one of Lizzie’s high stools and sipped from the white china cup Lizzie placed in front of her. Lizzie made her coffee in a percolator and told her Blue Mountain coffee from Jamaica was the finest in the world.

  ‘What’s happened? You look as if the sky has fallen in.’

  Vanessa tried to smile, but one side of her face refused to move, like that friend of her mother’s who had a stroke. Perhaps that was it. That’s why she felt so strange. It was nothing to do with Gerald, with his crushing dismissal of her work that morning. She’d had a stroke. That would account for the terrible deadness down the left side of her body, a deadness that made her heart want to stop beating.

  She hadn’t planned to tell Lizzie what had happened. She’d never criticised Gerald before, rarely even talked about him apart from praising his work – she didn’t need or want anyone else’s opinion – but once she’d started, it was hard to stop.

  Lizzie said all the things Vanessa would have expected of her: ‘selfish bastard’ … ‘men are all the same’ … ‘he’s probably frightened you’re more talented than he is’. But there were other things she wouldn’t have expected. ‘I’m not surprised he fell in love with you’ … ‘at least you’ve known great passion’ … ‘I hate to see you so sad’.

  She stroked Vanessa’s arm as she listened, comfortingly at first, and then there was something that changed, something in the pressure of her fingers that made Vanessa look up from the coffee cup she’d been staring into as she talked. Lizzie was leaning forward watching her. As their eyes met, Lizzie stretched across the breakfast bar, and her mouth brushed against Vanessa’s.

  It was a slight touch, the merest sensation of the softness of her lips. Vanessa could have stood up, eased herself from the stool, brushed the biscuit crumbs from her lap, called to the children. It would have been as if it had never happened. But she didn’t do any of those things. She stared at Lizzie, mesmerised by her eyes: two emeralds sparkling in her face.

  Lizzie slipped from her stool to the floor. She bent her knees until her face was level with Vanessa’s. She cupped her hands round Vanessa’s cheeks. Her palms were cool and firm. She moved closer until barely inches separated their faces. Vanessa could see flecks of gold in the green of Lizzie’s eyes, some stray hairs on her brow that she hadn’t plucked, the smoothness of the skin across her cheekbones. She closed her eyes and waited for the kiss.

  At home, Vanessa rushed round, getting the children ready for bed, preparing vegetables, turning on the oven for the lamb chops. She began making the rich tomato sauce Gerald liked. Lizzie’s kiss had shocked her into action. A beautiful princess had kissed her and reawakened her love for the prince, like some sort o
f reverse Sleeping Beauty. It wasn’t so much the kiss, as her reaction to it. She’d found her mouth opening and her hands reaching for Lizzie’s breasts. Her own nipples felt hard and a burning sensation erupted between her thighs, spreading upwards in a rush of warmth. Lizzie’s tongue was different from Gerald’s, more pointed, less confident, and her skin was soft.

  Vanessa put the lamb chops in the oven. Another few minutes and it would have been too late to tell Lizzie it was a mistake. The kiss would have said otherwise, and she understood Lizzie well enough to know she would be relentless in her pursuit. As it was, Lizzie just said she was sorry, she thought it was what Vanessa wanted and that women ought to be as free in their sexual relationships as men had always been. She hoped they would still be friends.

  Vanessa hoped so too, but it was Gerald she was worried about. Their marriage had come closer to the brink today than ever before, and she couldn’t wait to put things right. She’d make sure she worked on her designs in secret from now on. It was too easy for him to dismiss her work while it was scribbles on a piece of paper; it would be a different matter if she managed to get a contract with a knitwear company.

  At seven-thirty she read the children a story each, kissed them goodnight and sat down in the kitchen to wait. Eight o’clock came and went and he didn’t come home. She ate some food, the meat sticking to the sides of her throat, the potato glutinous in her mouth. At nine o’clock she scraped Gerald’s meal from the plate into the bin. She searched round in the cupboard and found a bottle of sherry and poured a glass. Its taste was sweet on her tongue, but at least the liquid made her insides glow.