by Tessa Hadley
Men liked Joyce. She could easily have had a steady boyfriend and got serious; but she held herself back, as if she needed to find out more before she could know what she wanted.
* * *
One afternoon the class went to draw outdoors in hilltop and were defeated by the rain. They crowded for refuge into Ray Deare’s flat, which was nearby; Joyce made them coffee on the gas ring. Iris was at college. It was strange to be there without her. The flat looked dingier, with dirty dishes left around and a glimpse through a door on the landing of an unmade bed with its blankets hanging down onto the floor. The rain blotted out the view from the long windows in the lounge. Ray looked round for some fruit for them to draw but could only ruefully offer them a couple of sprouting potatoes and a spotty banana.
—Come on, girls, someone suggested, one of you get your things off.
There was a haughty-faced student called Gillian Corbin; she was the one you thought of when you heard the rumor that they let rich girls without talent into the college in the hope that they would marry and support the poor male artists. Joyce guessed Gillian was going to offer to undress. She knew the others wouldn’t want to draw her. Yoyo complained that Gillian always came out looking more like a statue than a statue did.
—Come on, Ginger, said Yoyo, what about you?
—All right, she said, I’ll do it.
She looked at Ray.
—Shall I undress in your bedroom? Perhaps Iris has a robe or something I could borrow. D’you think she’d mind?
Ray was always scrupulously courteous to the models.
—This one is really such a mess, he said in perplexity, looking into the room with the unmade bed.
He opened the door into another bedroom across the landing.
—This is better. This is where I’m banished when I’m in the doghouse. These were almost the first words he had ever addressed to her personally. They were suddenly as intimate as old friends.
—I’ll get you something to slip on, he said. I’m afraid you might be cold. I’ll light the heater.
She stood and looked around: another double bed, this one just a mattress on the floor. It looked as though only one person had slept in it; the blankets were curved into a little body-shaped cell. On the floor beside the bed was a glass with an end of something in it that looked like whisky, a bottle of aspirin, an ashtray full of dottle from Ray’s pipe, and several books opened and left face down: D. H. Lawrence and Herbert Read and a copy of Encounter. It felt like a very male space; there were none of Iris’s little touches of color and ornament. She wondered what Ray meant by being in the doghouse and why he was ever banished here.
Then she started to undress. She had never modeled for a nude before. She wished there were a mirror in the room, just to confirm to herself that she looked how she believed she did: slim and tidy, with pale clear skin, a neat muff of pubic hair darker than the hair on her head, round firm breasts (Yoyo had called them plums), curvaceous hips, and a bottom that she knew appealed to men, although she would have liked to be narrower and less firmly planted on the earth. Ray knocked at the door and held a silky dressing gown into the room without looking.
—I’ll only be a moment, she said. Almost ready.
She crossed to the bed, sat naked on his pillow, and from there slipped herself down inside the space his body had made in the sheets; right down into it, so that she was quenched in its dark and immersed in its not unpleasant male-bed smell, of pipe smoke and sweat and unwashed hair. For a few long moments she breathed in and out. She wondered if he would be able to smell traces of her when he slept in this room next: her Mitsouko left behind on the sheets or some scent more secret and terrible. She didn’t care if he did.
Then she wriggled out and put on Iris’s dressing gown and without pausing to think about it walked out in front of the others and took the dressing gown off and let Ray arrange her on the chaise longue. At first the assault of everyone’s persistent unapologetic attention prickled on her skin. It was disconcerting how they dropped their heads to their drawings and then lifted them to check against her; she kept expecting them to meet her eyes. As she got used to it, she felt herself float restfully free. It was enough to be seen. She wasn’t responsible for herself; she didn’t have to decide anything or to act. It seemed a kind of triumph that even Ray Deare, whose knowledge and understanding stretched so far beyond what she could begin to imagine, should be laboring so absorbedly at representing her, while she sat dreaming.
He’ll find out for me who I am, she thought.
She was pleased to be looked at. Hadn’t she given herself, in mirrors, just such an intense scrutiny and been satisfied? And she felt full of cheerful contempt for anyone, her mother and her aunt, for instance, who would have thought there was any shame in this.
Later she happened to mention it to her sister, Ann. They were living at this time with their mother and Martin in a flat in Benteaston; she and Ann had to share a bedroom and Lil slept on the sofa in the living room. Ann was going to start at the university in September, studying literature.
—You’re joking, said Ann, incredulous, admiring. You mean to say you sat there naked while they all had their clothes still on and looked at you? You really mean everything off, not just your top?
—So what? Joyce said airily. We all do it. They just needed somebody to draw.
—You all do it? You mean the men as well?
—Well, no. She was patient, explaining the natural order of things. It might be more awkward, if the men posed, if they were your friends. The women don’t mind. And anyway, everyone likes to draw women’s bodies best. They’re more aesthetic.
She hadn’t quite recognized herself when she looked at the drawings the others made of her. But that person mostly looked all right, looked like the kind of girl who commands art, full of personality and power. In Ray Deare’s she was a concentration of white flesh, compacted under the force of thick wedge-shaped black lines, big knees drawn up in the foreground, black eyes staring over them with intensity out of a stark small face. She only saw it once before he put it away; in truth her heart jolted, because he had not made her beautiful.
* * *
In the middle of her second year at the college, joyce had to choose which course to continue with. She knew she wasn’t good enough to take Fine Arts. She had imagined at first that she might take Illustration. She saw herself in a light clean room full of plants and cushions, making fine subtle pictures of cats or children in India ink. Aunt Vera approved: Illustration seemed at once cultured and safe. Unfortunately, the other students who chose to take it—a middle-aged plump man and some plain dowdy girls—were not part of the crowd. Joyce was afraid their dowdiness might rub off on her and she might miss some of the fun. So she opted for Dress Design. She knew she would be good at that: she loved clothes and had an instinct for them. Anyway, as Lil said, with dressmaking she could always be sure of earning a living.
The Dress Design studio was in Kingsmile, a fifteen-minute walk from the main college building, upstairs above a co-op shop; it smelled of cheese and margarine. The girls found rats in their lockers, and the men from the co-op had to come up to kill them. They studied tailoring, millinery, pattern cutting; there were screens dividing up the rough board floor between the various years and classes. Miss Allinson who taught was a sharp-tongued spinster with melancholy hooded eyes, exquisitely dressed (the best girls sewed things for her).
Iris made a great point of celebrating Joyce’s decision.
—The men look down on it, she said, but they don’t understand: clothes are an art form in themselves. Just because they’re stuck with wearing their boring frowsty trousers and jackets and things, they don’t appreciate just how much real creative work we women have to put into what we wear.
—You seem to manage to do that and be a painter too.
Iris made a rueful face, waggling her cigarette in the corner of her mouth while she talked, squinting her eyes against the smoke, cleverly foldi
ng a tiny paper ruff with her tapering hands.
—Oh, my poor old painting. At the moment, it seems to be getting precisely nowhere. I’m so busy preparing classes for my children, learning horrid arithmetic to torture them with, trying to write my essay on Piaget.
She and Joyce were sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Hilltop flat, making hand puppets for a play Iris was putting on at the teacher training college. The heads were made of papier-mâché, the hands and feet of chamois leather; there was a King with a fierce red face and a pretty pink Queen. Joyce was helping to cut out the clothes. Ray was in college. They were drinking black coffee as usual. Joyce wondered about Iris’s housekeeping: there never seemed to be proper food in the flat. She never saw Iris eat anything, although sometimes there were strange things in the kitchen cupboard, bought from the expensive delicatessen round the corner: French meat pastes and Scandinavian salted fish and pots of sour yogurt. Joyce didn’t like to mention that she was hungry; in Iris’s company such an admission seemed demeaning.
—Can you imagine, said Iris, suddenly putting the King puppet down in her lap, what it’s like trying to think of yourself as a painter when you’re married to someone like Ray?
Joyce looked at her with earnest sympathy.
—I do see what you mean, she said, though I love your beautiful still lifes.
Iris shrugged.
—I worked so hard, she said. All the years I was at the art college I devoted myself to them, thinking that if I just persisted then they must eventually come right.
Joyce spoke carefully.
—Just because Ray’s work is so special, it doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for yours. It’s a different kind of thing.
—It’s worse than that. His paintings make me feel that my paintings are a lie. I thought they were authentic, but they weren’t the real thing. I was always looking through somebody else’s eyes. Perhaps I’ve never seen anything, really. Not like when Ray sees something.
Joyce looked at Iris in dismay. She could see this was a discovery it would be difficult to endure. She was thankful that she had not chosen Fine Arts.
—I’m not even sure how much I want to carry on with my own work. I think actually it’s more fulfilling, more truthful, for me to put myself in service of what Ray’s doing. That’s why I’m training as a teacher, really. I needed to have something practical to get on with, and then it means I can support us both, if he doesn’t sell enough work or if he gets tired of working at the college and just wants to paint.
Joyce did not question Iris’s estimate of the value of her own work. When she looked at one of her small still lifes again—red cherries heaped up on a plate, painted in fine careful brushstrokes against a dark background, one she had particularly loved—she thought perhaps she could see what Iris meant. Compared to one of Ray’s paintings, it seemed, yes, closed and bounded by convention. This corresponded, too, to some limitation she intuited in Iris. Although she so admired Iris’s distinctive stylishness, there was also something stolid and unvarying in her. Joyce thought this stolidity irritated Ray, and Iris didn’t know it. Things he casually and spontaneously said, Iris took over and translated into fixed superior positions. She thought he winced, sometimes, when his exaggerations came back to him as earnest doctrine.
Iris’s problem was that she wasn’t funny. In the crowd this was the one unforgivable lapse. Everything was funny, if only you were brave enough to see it. Their best times were when they were disorderly together, helpless with laughter, causing trouble and drawing disapproving looks, the girls complaining they were going to wet themselves. They told stories about the everyday things that happened to them that changed the ordinary grayness into a crazed colorful circus. An old man wearing all his war medals and no shirt saluted Dud Mason in the street every morning. Once while they were drawing Yoyo put on a lady’s hat and brought some steps and looked down at them from one of the high screens placed behind the model, as though he were nine feet tall. An organist broke wind in church in time to the music he was playing, and a choirboy fainted from suppressed laughter. A balloon bursting at Christmas blew off the paper hat of a dignified relative. Their parents’ hard-fought-for respectability—all that lifetime’s weight of effort over curtains and sideboards and putting milk in a jug and having a little stand to hold the cake plates and cleaning out your ears—exploded in a conflagration of mockery.
Joyce began to tell stories—tentatively at first, in case these things weren’t actually funny but humiliating—about her mother and her aunt and her uncle with his other woman. She told them about Gilbert, and how Vera tried to enlighten him through poetry. Ray laughed. He told them about the time when he had to run a gauntlet of catcalling women when his father took him into the garment-making rooms at a Co-op manufactory to be fitted for his school shorts. She was glad he didn’t mind being funny at his own expense. This was another rule: you were unforgivable if you took yourself too seriously (apart from your art, of course, which you couldn’t take seriously enough).
Joyce didn’t think Iris had irony. She had a suspicion that Iris never let up on the high seriousness with which she took things.
* * *
They all went to a fancy dress ball at the teacher training college. As art students they had to outdo the staid and much more conforming student teachers. Joyce made herself a tight-fitting black cat suit with a long tail that she carried draped over her arm; she drew whiskers on her cheeks and blacked the end of her nose and sewed pink satin pads onto black gloves for paws. She pinned up her hair under a black cap onto which she had stitched pointed ears. Yoyo came as Harpo Marx; Lenny Barnes was a playing card. Ray and Iris came as an Indian raja and rani; they had their faces stained brown and he wore a silky paisley turban and a mustache.
—Meow, Miss Stevenson, he said, when they met up outside the training college.
—Meow, Your Worshipfulness, she replied (she couldn’t quite think how one ought to address a raja). In her cat costume she felt licensed to be different from her usual circumspect self. She rubbed his nose with her black one, leaving a smudge, then did the same to Iris. Iris was poised and lovely in a full-length sari, a red Hindu wedding spot painted between her eyes, her long plait hanging down her back with a flower braided into the end. She tickled Joyce behind her cat ears.
The hall at the training college was new, all lined in blond wood with a pale parquet floor (the girls wearing stilettos had to take them off and dance in their stockings). They drank beer out of paper cups and danced to the trad band and then because it was Lenny’s birthday someone opened champagne and they drank some of that too. One wall was glass from floor to ceiling; there were long bright African print curtains but these had been left open, and outside as it got dark there came a huge brooding yellow moon, hanging close to the earth, glowing through the silhouettes of the trees.
—The moon! The moon! called Joyce, caterwauling at the window.
—My cold friend, said Iris, pressing her face and hands against the glass, come to watch but won’t come in. Hello, old friend! Are you lonely tonight?
Ray got out his pipe and smoked it, in spite of his turban. He even kept it in his mouth while he danced. Someone said he looked like Sherlock Holmes in disguise as a Lascar.
—A Lascar! said Lenny. Oh, I want to be a Lascar. What’s a Lascar?
Ray danced strenuously, hopping about and jerking his head from side to side, not perfectly in rhythm. He didn’t like trad jazz, he preferred contemporary. Joyce was shocked at his jogging about so willingly in his turban, his eyes shining weirdly against the dark skin. She might have been disappointed that he hadn’t remained loftily apart, but instead she felt a secret exhilaration, like an inward disrespectful joke, at being unbound from some of her awe of him. Even when he and Pete Smith were ranting about Munnings and the Royal Academy, she had to swallow an exultant laughter at his mouth saying such serious things under his ridiculously waggling false mustache.
At the end of the eve
ning, the Deares invited everyone back to their flat for coffee. Iris had already said that Joyce could stay in the spare room. When they got outside—the moon was higher in the sky and farther off by this time, silvery cool—Joyce knew she was drunk, with the wonderful kind of drunkenness where you progress along like a dodgem car by bumping into things and people and spinning forward, but there is never any chance of hurting anybody or falling over. She took to tickling the others on their necks with the end of her tail. This seemed a perfect satisfying expression of her tenderness for them all; eventually Dud Mason caught hold of her by the tail and pulled it off and wouldn’t give it back to her although she meowed piteously for it. (Dud was in a toga.) It was fun to be awake and alive and noisy in wet warm Hilltop, in all the rich green exhalations of the gardens, while behind the windows of the tall houses all the stuffy people lay sleeping. There had been a shower of rain while they were at the ball, and the roads and garden walls shone wet in the streetlights.
When they got into the flat, Dud said he was so hungry he could eat the rocking horse—he began, indeed, to gnaw on it—and then suddenly everyone was starving, and Iris and Joyce were making toast and frying eggs in the kitchen: extraordinary eggs, which no sooner broke and were in the pan than they were cooked, so that even while they were dishing them up and handing them out (Joyce still with her cat gloves on) the girls were calling everyone to come and look at the extraordinary miraculous eggs that cooked in an instant. The eggs, taken into the lounge and eaten with salt and dry toast, seemed delicious.
—Your friend’s out there again, said Joyce. She meant the moon; it was pressed onto the night outside the long lounge window like a bright sixpence.
Iris was startled and stared fearfully, as if she expected to see someone standing brooding on the balcony in the dark. After that she subsided into herself and sat wrapped tightly in her sari on the floor, the skin of her face marked purple with tiredness under the eyes and around the fine nostrils. Ray brought out a bottle of whisky. Joyce drank some out of the bathroom tooth mug that was the best he could do for a whisky glass (the others had eggcups and plastic picnic beakers). She had rubbed off her black nose and whiskers with Iris’s cold cream, and then washed her face in the bleak bathroom down half a flight of stairs, which the Deares shared with other tenants. Now she sat with her knees tucked under her among the cushions on the chaise longue and felt the men in the room orbit deliciously around her. Dud Mason, who was older and a third-year and so melancholy-funny, had coiled her cat tail up as a pillow under his cheek. He needed consoling for his poor foot, run over by a tank on D-Day, which made him hobble crookedly and for his toga that made him look so foolish. Yoyo was plucking an imaginary bass for her benefit, to the Modern Jazz Quartet playing “Skating in Central Park” on Ray’s portable record player. Pete Smith, hunkered in a corner, was out of the reach of her charm, but then she didn’t find him good-looking anyway. Gillian Corbin and Mary Anderson were eclipsed: Mary was asleep among the cushions (and anyway, although she was the best painter out of all the girls, she had buck teeth and thick pebble glasses); Gillian was waiting for a taxi to take her home.
