Life Class

by Allan, Gilli

  ‘I don’t regard the gnomes as art,’ he said flatly. ‘I prefer to wipe them totally from my mind.’

  ‘You have to be hard-nosed about it, particularly the bronzes …’

  ‘They are offered as limited editions. But it’s a purely theoretical concept.’

  ‘You’ve got to develop a more positive attitude,’ she said, with a touch of impatience. ‘Look, this producer, or someone like them, may well commission pieces from current artists. It’s something we need to find out.’ Dory blushed, and then hoped he hadn’t noticed she’d said ‘we’ without thinking. She ploughed on. Even to herself she sounded brisk and officious.

  ‘Then there are competitions. There are two open that I could find. One is to produce a war memorial in a coastal fishing port, in Yorkshire, I can’t recall the name off-hand. It’s to commemorate a ship that went down during a training exercise, with a battalion of GIs on board. It was just before D-Day, and the disaster was kept secret until recently. I’ve put the details in the folder. The other competition is to produce a piece … hang on,’ she brought up the details on the screen. ‘That’s right, to create a piece which “encapsulates the spirit of the town” to be incorporated into the plans for the redevelopment around the docks in Painchester. About time too, in my opinion. That’s where all the local prostitutes ply their trade …’

  ‘They’ve got to go somewhere,’ Stefan said. There was a definite edge to his voice now, but his eyes were still focused on the monitor. At first he’d seemed stunned by what she’d shown him, but now she wondered if he was even pleased. His expression was closed, unreadable.

  ‘It’s also where the drug dealers hang out,’ she added, squaring her shoulders. ‘But you’re right, cleaning up one area only moves the problem to another. It’s easy to lay blame, far more difficult to come up with solutions. So …’ Shrugging off her sense of misgiving and adopting a back to business tone, she held out the folder. ‘This competition gives you another local possibility.’ He made no move. There was nothing for it but to finish what she’d started. ‘I’ve printed off the brief and the entry form. It’s all in here.’ Instead of taking the folder from her, the legs of his chair scraped back across the floor. Her heart sank at the sudden discord. Stefan stood up abruptly.

  ‘I didn’t expect any of this.’ He sounded rattled and defensive.

  ‘I know. But you need to be more commercially minded.’

  ‘If I’d wanted to pursue commerciality do you think I’d be in this position?’

  ‘I understand. I’m only using the term with regard to earning a living.’

  ‘This is my fault. I must have given you the wrong signals.’

  ‘I’m only trying to help.’

  ‘Help? I don’t need … I never asked for help.’

  The realisation that she’d blown it crackled painfully in her voice. ‘I thought …?’

  ‘That’s the trouble. You thought you’d take over. Bloody hell! You said your sister was the bossy one!’

  ‘But …’

  ‘Look. I’m sorry. I can see that you’ve gone to a lot of trouble. I didn’t ask you to. There’s no way I’m doing any of this stuff … it’s not me. I thought I’d explained.’

  Another time, it might have been funny. Instead, the sight of him struggling to pull his trainers back on just underlined her sense of a lost opportunity.

  Chapter Thirty-seven - Fran

  Alone in her bedroom, Fran stared out into the dusk. Through her open window she could hear the TV and intermittently, the laughing voices of her husband and daughter downstairs. They were watching some glitzy US series, and probably poking fun at the female forensic technician who, always dressed in white with her cleavage on display, teetered around the scene of crime in four-inch heels.

  Mel had changed from the pudgy teenager who’d obstinately thrown her backpack over her shoulder and set off for Thailand with her friends. Now she was a slender young woman, her prettiness transmuted into a fragile, haunted beauty. Fran knew she wasn’t forgiven. She couldn’t predict if she ever would be. But the bond between father and daughter had grown stronger, and more exclusive.

  She recalled, with wistful nostalgia, the days when she’d been irritated by Peter’s untidiness. Now the house was not just untidy, it was in utter chaos. Since Mel’s return, Peter had embarked on a manic clear out. He started with the study – or more accurately – the PC. A skip had been delivered and left at one end of the in-and-out driveway. To watch her placid and kindly husband standing inside the skip, smashing the computer into fragments with a sledgehammer, had been chilling.

  When he’d first picked it up and carried it outside to be thrown into the skip, it was Mel who ran out after her father.

  ‘You shouldn’t do that! Details can be retrieved off the hard drive.’ Fran and Peter didn’t bank online or pay utility bills that way, but once the idea had been planted, Peter could not let go the fear that the email correspondence between his wife and her old lover could somehow be unearthed from the wretched machine. He couldn’t rest until it was a heap of mangled plastic, spewing circuits, and microchips. He even smashed up the monitor, keyboard, and printer, while Melanie stood by, hands on hips, in eloquent disdain of the foolishness of the older generation. Watching them both, Fran felt the familiar pang of guilt.

  They’d both changed. Peter was silent, his expression bitter, as he turned out the study, piling up years of old documents, box files, correspondence, and old receipts. The house even smelt different. Its usual scent – a combination of lavender, lemon, and pine – was smothered by a dry, fusty miasma. The air was constantly hazy with it. Books, undisturbed for years and trailing cobwebs as thick and dense as antique grey ribbon were pulled off the shelves and thrown onto the floor. It was almost as if he was looking for something, a secret cache of love letters, perhaps?

  But she didn’t attempt to defend herself, nor try to reassure him. Though the study was the first to be hit by his whirlwind determination to de-clutter, it wasn’t the only room to have fallen victim to his sudden zeal for a radical clear-out. Wherever stuff had accumulated in squirrelly hoards, he found it and dragged it out. Did she need this? Did she want that? Why was she keeping this rubbish?

  The dogs followed him – feathery ears doing radar swoops – manically excited by the unfamiliar activity and the books, magazines, and boxes, furry with dust, which appeared in piles all around the house. But their excitement became tempered by a perplexed anxiety. Ignored and occasionally shouted at, they were now more typically to be found huddled together in their basket, looking crestfallen and depressed.

  If Peter had approached the job systematically it would have been easier for Fran to cope, but she knew better than to open her mouth on the subject. Peter neither wanted her help nor to listen to anything she had to say. It was hard to face the fact that he no longer trusted or believed her.

  As for the life class, she hadn’t been back despite her sister’s reassurance that no one suspected the real reason she’d quit the lesson so dramatically. The approved story was that she’d felt suddenly sick. Maybe Dory had said that to most of them, Fran thought, but what about Stefan? Those two were becoming as thick as thieves.

  Chapter Thirty-eight - Stefan

  Stefan pulled the front door closed behind him, clattered down the outside steps, and nearly reached the manicured towpath before he came to a standstill and began to question himself. What kind of idiot was he? He knew damn well the internet was a tool he should be using. Even Dominic had said so. As for the rest – Dory had run a business. Of course she knew better than he how to go about self-promotion. But he was too proud, too thin-skinned, too determined to make it on his own to be able to accept help.

  Only minutes had passed since his abrupt exit, but she opened the door in rubber gloves.

  ‘I was rude and boorish,’ he said. ‘Please forgive me.’

  ‘And I was inept and tactless. I felt nervous. I couldn’t prevent myself from sounding li
ke I was delivering a lecture. And when I said you needed to be commercial, I didn’t mean …’

  He saw a slick of damp gleaming on her flushed face. She lifted an enormous, yellow, rubber hand, swiping the back across her forehead. A clump of bubbles was deposited on her hairline.

  ‘That I should give the public what it wants? I know. Though that wouldn’t be a bad starting point.’

  ‘But not by going for the lowest common denominator!’

  From nowhere, he began to laugh. ‘I’m sorry. Your hands aren’t really that big, are they?’

  Dory looked down with a grimace. ‘I spend too much time in tight latex gloves. I prefer a bit of room in the domestic variety!’ Now smiling at one another, his amusement faded.

  ‘It was unforgivable to walk out like that, without even offering to help with the dishes. I really am sorry. I’ve lived on my own for too long. My social graces are nil. I’m too stupidly pig-headed.’

  ‘It was probably my fault,’ she interjected. ‘You must have thought me presumptuous. Maybe I am too much like my sister, but …’

  ‘No, it was me. I’ve this bug lodged in my brain about proving my father wrong and succeeding on my own, without help.’

  ‘It’s not as if there’s any help I could give you to create art. I’m only pointing out marketing opportunities.’

  ‘I realised that before I’d gone too far.’ He shook his head at his own crass stupidity. ‘And I couldn’t leave it like that, you thinking the worst of me, without explaining. So? No hard feelings?’

  ‘No hard feelings.’

  ‘I am really grateful that you went to so much trouble. In the future, if you ever feel like going through any of those ideas with me again …?’

  Dory stepped back. ‘It’s not late. I’ve some other suggestions if you’re interested? And there’s some chocolate cake I was going to offer earlier.’

  ‘Advertising,’ she said later, as they settled back in the living room with a new bottle of wine open on the coffee table and a slab of cake each. ‘Glossy mags. The living-in-posh-homes-with-big-gardens variety.’ She pulled one out from a folder and flicked to the back where there was page after page of small ads. ‘Of course, the bigger the advert, the more it costs, but …’ Re-opening the magazine at a flagged page she showed him a full-page advertisement for garden ornaments, urns, and statuary. ‘You have to speculate to accumulate. Then again, there are people who manage to promote themselves without.’ She picked up the County magazine and opened it at another flagged page; a full-page photo of a local entrepreneur. As well as pictures of ‘his lovely house and garden’, there were several pages of text about his life and business.

  ‘That’s free advertising, and it didn’t happen by accident,’ she said. ‘Month after month, these magazines have to fill their pages. Local magazines in particular need stories about local people. And, I’m sorry to say, because it isn’t fair, good-looking people are far more likely to be featured. They’re more promotable.’

  ‘That rules me out, then,’ he said, with a half laugh, licking chocolate off his lips.

  ‘You are joking?’ Dory stared at him, then looked away abruptly.

  He was confused. The implication was unmistakeable ‘Um, well, I suppose, it’s not for me to say. It’s not something I think about.’

  Dory cleared her throat and shuffled the magazines together on her lap. ‘If you sent a professionally produced press release to papers and magazines, obviously with photographs of your sculptures, but including your house and yourself, I’d be surprised if you didn’t get some interest.’

  ‘But the house …’

  ‘Is fabulous. Maybe it needs to be professionally cleaned and a lick of paint wouldn’t go amiss. Move the furniture round a bit. Make a feature of those antique cupboards and chests, which have the added benefit of making something of your Czech roots. And remember, magazines have stylists who’d do the finishing touches. Then of course, there’s the garden. We could even take some of your sculptures outside. You saw how dramatic and interesting they can look in a natural setting. It would be brilliant!’

  Baffled by her enthusiasm, he said, ‘It all seems … too much.’

  ‘There are many different avenues you could try, even local TV and radio. But the crux of what I’m talking about is bigging yourself up, turning yourself into a local personality. So when people in the area think sculpture, they’ll think Stefan Novak.’

  ‘All this …?’ His head buzzed. ‘It’s what I was trying to say earlier. I can’t even begin to do any of it. I haven’t the time or the expertise. Or, at the moment, the space in my brain to even think about it. It’s so very kind of you, but …’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Dory interrupted.

  They stood outside her front door on the small external landing. The scented night air was still warm.

  ‘I don’t know what to say. You’ve worked so hard on this. Thank you doesn’t seem adequate. I’m …’ He looked up at the violet, star-pricked sky for inspiration. ‘Overwhelmed.’

  ‘Don’t thank me. It’s easy for me. People have different skills.’

  ‘But please, please don’t do anything just yet, not until …’

  ‘I know. Dom. He’s my first priority. I admit I don’t quite know how I’m going to convince him. I don’t know him well, and all that heavy-metal garb seems designed to keep people at arm’s length.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s its purpose,’ Stefan said. ‘I can see the appeal of the imagery to an adolescent boy. But I can take or leave the music. With the death metal stuff it’s always leave. But power metal can be surprisingly operatic.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Dory laughed. ‘My ignorance is total so I’ve always steered clear of his musical tastes. Too easy to fall into the trap of seeming patronising or embarrassing.’

  ‘Very wise.’

  ‘I’ve only chatted to Dom about art. He was a bit wary at first, but once he realised I wasn’t coming on to him, he relaxed.’ Dory pushed her fingers back through her hair. Stefan smiled. ‘Um … I’ll give you a call to let you know when I’m going to raise the subject with him. I’ve had an idea, but there’s something I need to sort out before I speak to him.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He looked at her, not sure now what to do. ‘I’ve really appreciated this evening, especially your understanding.’

  ‘I want to help.’

  ‘I’m very grateful. Thank you again for everything. And for feeding me. It was a treat, especially the cake.’

  ‘You’re welcome. It’s an age since I made one. I thought you might be a chocolate cake sort of guy.’

  ‘It’s been … it is … a lovely night.’ He leant forward to kiss her cheek, but almost immediately pulled back. He barely felt the warm downiness of her skin. Silently calling himself every name under the sun for his cowardice, his lack of social grace, his ineptitude, he ran down the steps and, turning once with a half wave, set off for the towpath.

  Chapter Thirty-nine - Fran

  Living with people who seemed to hate you was an uncomfortable experience. Thank goodness it was a large house and she could always escape to another room. Finding a room that didn’t look like a junkyard hit by a hurricane was less easy. She picked up the phone and keyed in her sister’s number.

  ‘I’m sorry, Fran. I’m busy.’

  ‘Oh, Dory, you’re always busy these days. Feels like I’ve been sent to Coventry by everyone. Did I tell you what Peter did to the PC?’

  Dory listened in silence. ‘But … she eventually blurted. For a moment, Fran wondered where that ‘But’ might lead. ‘Seems a bit wasteful,’ Dory added.

  ‘The bottom line is that he doesn’t trust me. Nor does Mel. She looks so wounded whenever I catch her eye. They’re punishing me, Dory! ‘

  ‘Are they wrong to blame you?’

  This wasn’t what she wanted from her sister.

  ‘You’re just going to have to grit your teeth and put up with it for a while,’ Dory continued. ‘It w
on’t last forever. They’ll come around, I can’t imagine Peter bearing a grudge for too long. And in one way, this whole debacle may be a necessary wake-up call for Melanie. She’s at an age where she must realise she’s got to start taking responsibility for her own actions. She can’t expect Mum and Dad to appear over the hill like the cavalry riding to her rescue every time she gets herself into trouble.’

  ‘I just wish it hadn’t happened. I must have been mad.’

  ‘I think you were, just a little. But it’s the kind of temporary delusion that could probably afflict anyone. Peter will realise that.’

  ‘I’d really love to see you. Do you fancy going to Bath tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow’s Friday. Life class.’

  ‘You could miss it.’

  ‘So you’re planning to skip another class? How many is that now?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve not been keeping count.’

  ‘It’s already the middle of June. You don’t want to miss the last few lessons of the year, do you? Surely you’re not still embarrassed? Everyone’s forgotten about the Dermot thing.’

  There was no answer that didn’t sound idiotic and wimpy. Instead, Fran asked, ‘Well, how about next week? How about Monday?’

  ‘What about Monday?’

  ‘It’s your day off. We could do something together? Go to lunch?’

  ‘Sorry. I’m probably going up to London.’

  ‘Oh, Dory, can I come with you? I’d love to do some shopping!’

  ‘I’m not going shopping.’

  ‘What are you doing, then?’ Fran heard her sister sigh.

  ‘If you must know, I’m hoping to stop over at Malcolm’s.’

  ‘You’re planning to stay the night with the tosser?’

  ‘I’m not sharing his bed!’

  ‘Not so long ago you said you never wanted to lay eyes on the man again!’

  ‘Look, it’s complicated. I’ve business to do in London. If they’re willing to have me. I’m not about to cut off my nose to spite my face. I tried to arrange it for this week, but it wasn’t convenient for Gabriella. So I’m hoping to schedule for next Monday. It’s still not certain, but if … it may take twenty-four hours.’