The Art School Dance

by Maria Blanca Alonso

  ‘This is a poor girl, Gus. I need some cash.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be in this business for the money,’ he said, tut-tutting gravely, and we had a bit of an argument about it in the studio, there was a general debate about artistic integrity, opinions offered for and against Gus’ view. I wasn't really interested in their opinions, though; without being boastful I knew my work was good, that one or two bits of commercial crap would not diminish its worth.

  *

  My estimation of the quality of my work was corroborated later that week, at the regular ‘crit’ which was held in the studio each month. Over a full day, sometimes two, the tutors gathered together all us students and lambasted our work, and at this particular ‘crit’, the last one of the year, I was one of the few people to earn any praise, primarily on account of the portrait and the crucified side of beef. This wasn’t to say that everyone’s work was bad, it was just that the ‘crits’ were always so stiff; there were often occasions when the insults came thick and fast, sometimes with such venom that you might feel like giving up, and I’d seen some students, girls and blokes alike, almost reduced to tears. Generally we were able to give as good as we got, though, we had to believe in our work and defend it and to hell with any respect we should have for our elders, the tutors.

  It being the last ‘crit’ of the year, we followed it up with a bit of a booze-up in the ‘Commercial’, and the tutors came along for an hour or so, to buy drinks for those they might have offended, to continue discussions a little more amicably. I found it a welcome change, after the years at school, to be able to say what I liked to those who taught me, to disagree and to argue and even to insult, to be on first name terms and treated as an equal, to have my opinions respected and considered rather than dismissed as adolescent whimsy.

  After the ‘crit’, then, about a dozen of us gathered in the pub, along with Maggie and Ian, who treated us to the first round; Ben had said he would follow, he had a little paperwork to complete. We got through our first pint, talked over some minor grievances which had arisen from the ‘crit’, and Ben arrived just in time to buy the second round. He had Paula with him, but this was no surprise to any of us; she might dress too smartly to be either student or staff, but she was just as much a part of the art school as any of us.

  The ‘Commercial’ was a quaint little place, though it was always obvious that it would never survive in this same state. At the end of a cul-de-sac in the centre of town, it was almost Dickensian to my way of thinking, with the street cobbled and dimly lit and the pub itself dwarfed all around by the rear aspects of shops and offices, so grubby with their crumbling brickwork and rusting fire escapes. Inside the pub the ceilings were low and the rooms so small that at such gatherings our group from the art school could fill a whole room. One great thing about the place was that there’s waitress service; a button was pressed on the wall -which Ben now did- and a barmaid came to take the order.

  ‘Drink for this motley crowd,’ he told the barmaid, and she jotted down what we wanted; pints of bitter, glasses of lager, bottles of brown ale and the like. There was no change out of the money he gave her, not after including a tip for her service, but none of us students felt guilty; we were sure that he was on a good salary and could afford it. We still thanked him, though, appreciative, knowing that he was not obliged to treat us but did so freely.

  All talk of the ‘crit’ was soon finished with and the conversation became more general. If I ever thought back later to the conversations I was drawn into in those art school days I would see that they really give me quite a broad education; we didn’t only talk about painting, but also about music, film, theatre, literature, subjects I learned little about when I was at school. School just helped me to pass exams, it didn’t really teach me anything. Just about the only subject we never touched upon now is politics; as art students we were not in the least altruistic, not at all interested in the welfare of others. But there again, the same might well be said of many politicians.

  Eventually the conversation got around to Christmas, when someone mentions that I was earning a little extra cash in readiness for it. Chrissie asked Ben what he was buying his young son, a cute little lad we’d seen in college a few times, only six years old but looking very much like Ben in miniature.

  ‘A rope ladder,’ Ben answered, and we all laughed.

  ‘A rope ladder?’ said Chrissie. ‘You’re having us on.’

  ‘No I’m not,’ Ben assured her, and his expression was solemn, as if he was unable to understand the reason for our laughter. ‘What’s wrong with a rope ladder? It’s a practical present, he’ll get plenty of exercise with it and it’ll do him more good than some violent video game or what have you. He’ll have a great time with it, you mark my words.’

  Yes, we believed him, but we still laughed at his eccentricity, and he smiled back with good humour, with not a hint of malice or ill-feeling. Maggie, though, she had a wicked gleam in her eye as she turned to me.

  ‘What about you, Ginny?’ she asked.

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘What are you getting for Christmas? More to the point, what are you getting that dishy boyfriend of yours?’

  ‘Well it’s not going to be a portrait of him, is it?’ I said bitterly.

  ‘Aftershave, then? Something by Calvin Klein, perhaps?’

  ‘Perhaps, if I can get together enough cash. What’s it to you, anyway?’

  Maggie grinned behind a veil of her foul tobacco smoke and turned away to strike up a conversation with someone else. I felt a touch angry with her and gulped down a mouthful of beer, hoping that Maggie hadn’t mentioned to anyone else that I asked her to do a portrait of Stephen; that could be embarrassing, especially if someone like Gus found out. I set my glass on the table, stared silently at it for a while, until I noticed Paula had shifted along a seat or two and was now beside me.

  ‘Take no notice of her, Ginny,’ she said, glancing at Maggie. ‘She always tends to start teasing people when she’s had a drink or two.’

  ‘I know that,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind her.’

  We both took a sip of our drinks, then Paula asked me about the work I had lined up for Christmas.

  ‘Painting, is it?’

  ‘Of a sort,’ I said, and explained exactly what sort.

  ‘Will you make much out of it?’

  ‘Not an awful lot, but every little bit helps.’

  With what I took to be a secretive glance about her, at the rest of the company, Paula brought her face closer. I coul smell her perfume, a little stronger now that it wasn’t diluted by the sweat of the life class, could feel the warmth of the woman’s breath on my cheek.

  ‘If you need to earn more cash I can get you a job on the post,’ she whispered.

  ‘You can?’ I said, for I knew how difficult it was to get holiday work with the Post Office; every student in town and every student home on vacation was after a job over the Christmas holiday.

  ‘Yes, no problem at all. My father’s in personnel there. You could squeeze in seven or eight days’ work, perhaps even more.’

  ‘That would be great.’

  ‘Keep quiet about it, though, keep it to yourself. I don’t want everyone in college asking me.’

  I promised. ‘I won’t say a word to a soul.’

  Chapter Five

  With the guarantee of a job at the Post Office I didn’t really need the work in the market hall, but I had made my promises to Arthur and Mrs Littlehales and I kept my word. Inevitably, working on their ‘commissions’ in the evenings and at weekends, I didn’t have an awful lot of time to spare for Stephen, and it was some while before I realised how little I actually missed his company.

  My mother was too distracted to notice Stephen’s absence, she was busy herself, getting ready for the holiday with all her usual efficiency, but Gran was as nosy and suspicious as ever.

  ‘Have you two fallen out?’ she asked me, over tea on Monday, after a weekend and much of the prev
ious week had passed without a single visit from Stephen.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why hasn’t he been around?’

  ‘I’ve been busy. He knows that, and so do you. I’ve had a lot of work to do.’

  The old woman had that sour expression on her face when she looked up from her plate, and I knew it wasn’t the fault of the food. ‘Your work’s more important than seeing your boyfriend, is it?’

  It would have been imprudent to say more important, so I just said, ‘It’s important. Stephen appreciates that.’

  ‘But you don’t appreciate him, he’s too good for you,’ Gran grumbled, picking at her food again, using her fork to rearrange it on the plate, her hand never still even while she was chewing.

  ‘But it’s him I’m doing the work for,’ I protested, though this wasn’t exactly true; the commercial work was for the money to buy him a present, yes, but basically all the work I did was for myself.

  Gran had her head bowed over her plate, but she looked at me with hooded eyes, distrustfully; her shallow sunken cheeks and the beak of a nose reminded me of a gargoyle, sneering down from a great height on the people below. I left the rest of my tea and took the plate through to the kitchen, threw away the scraps and left it with the other dirty dishes. My mother had all the cupboards emptied and was washing down every surface there was, inside and out; this was the start of her pre-Christmas routine, to clean throughout the house just so that it could be littered again by Christmas itself.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t upset Gran so much, Ginny,’ she said. ‘She’s old and set in her ways, you should know you can’t argue with her.’

  ‘I don’t argue.’

  ‘You’re doing it now,’ she pointed out, resorting to one of Gran’s own ploys.

  ‘I’ve got my ways, just like Gran has.’

  ‘They’re not the ways you used to have, though. Art school’s changing you.’

  It was to be hoped it was, but I didn’t say this, just excused my behaviour as a sign that I was growing up. Remembering that I hadn’t been out much for the past week or so, except for the booze-up after the ‘crit’, I told my mother that I'd take a walk down the road for a drink. I knew she wouldn’t mind this, me going to the local; she’d see it as me keeping true to my roots, not being too snobbish to mix with the folk we’ve known all our lives. I think this actually troubled my mother more than the clothes I wore or the colour of my hair, the danger that going to college might make me think that I was too good for my old mates.

  When I said I going out, then, my mother was quite pleased, even gave me a couple of pounds so she was sure I could buy a round of drinks if I had to.

  In the pub I go to there was no animosity towards me, even though I wore the leather jacket with my name on the back, no snide remarks about the way I looked, not even from the older men, the hard men, the ex-colliers. I suppose they’d seen things which were even harder to comprehend, like world wars and general strikes. Anyway, they had known me all my life, known all my family, knew us as a decent, honest, hard working bunch.

  I said hello to one or two people at the bar, bought a half of lager, popped my head around the door to the games room. It was only small, not much of a games room at all; there were two old blokes playing dominoes, a couple of younger lads playing darts, but no women. This was one of the unspoken traditions of Sleepers Hill, that women avoided the games room, for this was where the working men went to relax, to spit and curse and argue. A woman in their company would only inhibit their pleasures; a man might as well go to church as take a woman into the games room of a pub or club, for all the pleasure that would afford him.

  I resisted the impulse to enter, to play the rebel; now that would have set people talking about me.

  *

  In the ‘lounge’, off to one side of the games room, I was drinking quietly when two old school-friends entered. They had been in a less academic set than me, had left school at sixteen and been working since. This was one of the reasons I no longer saw much of them, it had nothing to do with snobbery, they were working people and behaved as such, putting on their finery and perfume at weekends, spending money which I didn’t have, trying to impress the prospective husband which I didn’t want. Quite a few of my old pals were courting, as they called it, some even engaged or married, but there could still be the occasional night or two when I could meet them on more or less equal terms, no different from each other than we had been as school-kids in gym-slips.

  Tina was a typist, Diane a bank clerk, and with my mother’s pounds added to the money I already had I could afford to treat them to a drink. We toasted each other and sat at the bar as people with money do. Tina and Diane had changed since leaving school, work had given them a self assurance and quickly made them older; in a way they seemed more mature, they had taken on an aspect of their parents, talking of careers and income tax and superannuation. In turn, though, I believed that I had developed mentally and spiritually; though they looked like young career women and had some of the preoccupations of such, speaking of ‘earning a wage’ and ‘settling down’, at times the schoolgirl mentality still showed through, as when Tina asked how art school was going and grinned pruriently when she mentioned the matter of drawing naked women.

  ‘Art school’s fine,’ I said. ‘And yes, I’m still drawing naked women.’

  ‘I don’t know that I could cope with that,’ Diane frowned. ‘Blokes all around me with drawing boards bouncing up and down in their laps like nobody’s business.’

  The schoolgirl mentality, see? The drawing boards dislodged by the inevitable erections. I laughed when they laughed, but I couldn’t help but notice it.

  ‘Don’t you get embarrassed?’ Tina asked me.

  ‘Perhaps at first I did,’ I admitted. ‘You soon get used to it, though.’

  ‘Doesn’t she get embarrassed? You know, the model?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘She must be a bit brazen, then, a bit of a tart to take her clothes off in front of people like that.’

  ‘She isn’t, not in the least,’ I said, rising to Paula’s defence. ‘I’ll tell you what, Tina, if you saw her walking down the street I bet you wouldn’t say that about her.’

  ‘She’s a good looking woman, is she?’

  ‘Very classy,’ I said.

  We emptied our glasses and Tina bought three more drinks, then asked what I was going to do at the end of the course.

  ‘Move on somewhere else to do a degree. This is only a foundation course. I’ve got three more years to do after this.’

  ‘Another three years? Jesus!’

  ‘And three more after that, if I’m lucky,’ I added hopefully. ‘If I’m good enough I’ll go on to do a post graduate course, the Royal College or the Slade, somewhere like that.’

  ‘Seven years at college?’ Diane gasped.

  ‘If I’m lucky,’ I repeated.

  ‘The first twenty odd years of your life spent at school?’

  ‘Art college isn’t like school,’ I pointed out.

  ‘No,’ Tina agreed. ‘We didn’t have naked women to draw when I was at school.’

  ‘Just plants and bottles and such,’ Diane remembered. ‘Now if there’d been the chance of some nudes I might have tried a bit harder.’

  ‘What? Someone like old Mrs Bolton posing for us?’

  A couple of drinks and the good humour of the evening went to my head, my cheeks felt flushed; when my friends suggested moving on somewhere else, though, I was reluctant. They probably guessed the reason, that I couldn’t afford to, and they insisted, said it would be their treat. We stopped at another pub or two, slowly moving closer into town, and Tina and Diane took turns paying for the drinks out of their wage packets; it seemed that everyone had a wage packet to spend that night and the nearer the three of us got to town the more crowded the pubs became.

  *

  In town itself we found ourselves chatting to three young blokes; they were a little loud, a little brash, b
ut Tina and Diane accepted this and played them along, it was just a little innocent entertainment before the serious courting of the weekend. Jokes started as risqué‚ and became cruder, the laughter of the young men became more raucous and there were lurid descriptions of the things I got up to at art school, invented by Tina and richly embellished by Diane. The young bloke I was sat next to looked at me a little uncertainly, not sure whether to believe their tales, not sure what to think of the way I looked; I suppose it came as a surprise to him that I spoke just like the rest of them, came from a similar home and had been to a similar school; perhaps it even came as a shock to him that an art student was not necessarily the alien creature he had imagined.

  ‘Well, what do you think?’ asked Tina, when two of the blokes went to the gents and the third to the bar.

  ‘About what?’ I said.

  ‘Those three. Do you reckon they’re worth sharing another drink or two with?’

  This was probably the self same question that the two in the toilet were asking each other, and not one that I really wanted to concern myself with.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with me, you can leave me out of it,’ I said.

  ‘Oh no, you can’t leave yourself out. We’ve been buying the drinks all evening so you owe it to us to stay. You know that if there’s three of them and only two of us they’ll bugger off.’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t want to get involved.’

  ‘Who’s asking you to get involved?’ said Diane. ‘We’re not expecting you to propose to the bloke, for God’s sake, just keep him company.’

  ‘Talk to him.’

  ‘Let him walk you home, even if you don’t fancy doing anything else with him. We promise we won't breathe a word to Stephen.’

  ‘I’m not worried about Stephen,’ I said.

  ‘Fine, then. It’s settled.’

  ‘No it’s not,’ I told them, but I saw that there’s was no way out, the two who had been to the toilet were returning from their own deliberations, the third was setting drinks on the table and Tina and Diane had me wedged in a corner.