Pat Barker: Life Class

Decided now, he quickened his pace, but just then a group of nursemaids pushing perambulators came bowling along towards him, taking up the full width of the path. By the time he’d made up the lost ground the girl had turned through the gate. Panting as he reached the spot, he looked up and down the road, but the pavements were crowded and, among the hundreds of hurrying people, her unsteady gait was no longer so conspicuous. And then he saw her, far away now, on the other side of the road, but there was no pause in the traffic to let him cross. He stood on tiptoe, seeing the black straw hat with its little bunch of cloth violets bobbing along, until eventually it was lost to sight in the milling crowds.

He’d left all his things at the Slade so he had to go back there. Jumping on a bus, he found a seat on the top deck and gazed out over the heads of the crowds. For the first few minutes he kept on searching for the girl, though he knew he wouldn’t see her.

The exhilaration had gone now. He was back with his own problems. Should he admit defeat and leave the Slade? Was he wasting Nan’s legacy?

– ’ Course you bloody are. Art! It’s not for people like us, such as that.

What ‘people like us’ did — or, more frequently, didn’t do — had been a favourite topic of hers, the pincers used to nip off any green shoot of hope and ambition one or other of her children might have been cherishing. They’d learned not to, fast enough. She hadn’t applied it to herself though, at least not towards the end of her long life. At eighty, she’d bought herself a motor car. The only motor car previously seen in their streets belonged to the local doctor. Every Friday afternoon and all day Saturday she’d been driven round to collect her rents, sitting up on the back seat, ramrod straight (though she was a martyr to her back), dismounting now and then to bang on the doors of one ramshackle house after another, wresting coppers from reluctant hands. She must have been the most hated woman in the city.

— Aye, mebbe. But it put the clothes on your back, didn’t it? And paid for you to go to that posh school.

He got off near Russell Square and walked the rest of the way. Students were streaming away from the Slade as he approached, but he kept his head down, not wanting to speak to anybody. He hadn’t reached a decision, though if anything all that pacing round the park had strengthened his feeling that he ought to leave as soon as possible.

The Antiques Room did nothing to change his mind. Plaster casts of Classical and Renaissance sculpture stood in a line along one wall.

— Cartload of fellers showing their whatsits.

He’d spent whole mornings copying them, whole days when he first started, except for an hour at the end of the afternoon session when they were allowed to troop down the corridor to join the life class. On benches at the far end were smaller pieces: decapitated heads, limbless torsos, amputated arms and legs. Like an abattoir without the blood.

Had all his time in this room been wasted?

No time to be asking that question now. He picked up his bag and was about to leave when he heard a noise and turned to find Elinor Brooke standing by the open door.

‘I thought I heard somebody,’ she said.

She came towards him until she was close enough to touch. A stir of desire, almost indistinguishable from irritation. He wasn’t in the mood for ‘the treatment’ — by which he meant the air of intimacy Elinor created between herself and any man she spoke to, though to be fair it wasn’t only men, he’d seen her adopt exactly the same approach to women. No, he wasn’t in the mood for Miss Brooke, but then she raised her gigantic blue eyes to his … ‘Gig lamps,’ his father used to say. ‘Eyes like gig lamps.’ It had been one of the magic phrases of his childhood.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

‘Only I heard you’d walked out of the life class.’

He wondered which of the men had told her. ‘I needed a bit of fresh air.’

‘Was it something Tonks said?’

‘You know Tonks. He more or less said I was wasting my time.’

‘Ouch.’

‘Ye-es, ouch. Anyway, after that I thought I’d better go away and do some thinking. I couldn’t just go on drawing.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘Hyde Park.’ He smiled. ‘I didn’t exactly run away to sea, did I? Do you mind if I smoke?’

‘No, go ahead. I might even join you.’

Her pupils shrank as the match flared between them. ‘What are you going to do?’

No advice, he noticed. She often asked for advice from men, but never gave it. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s any point staying till the end of term. I mean, you could say, if I’m wasting my time the sooner I’m out of here the better.’ A dragging pause. ‘He likes your work.’

‘Yes,’ she said, simply. ‘I know.’

They smoked in silence for a while. Then she said, ‘Life drawing isn’t the be-all and end-all, you know.’

‘It is here.’

‘So perhaps here isn’t the right place?’

He shook his head. It had taken so much determination to cut loose from his background and come to the Slade that he could hardly grapple with the idea that he’d made the wrong choice.

‘Anyway,’ Elinor said, standing up. ‘I’d better be getting on.’ She turned toward the door, then looked back. ‘A few of us are going to the Café Royal tonight. Would you like to come?’

He hesitated, but only for a second. What else was he going to do except sit inhis lodgings and brood about his non-existent future? ‘Yes, I’d like that. What time?’

‘About eight.’

‘Good. I’ll see you there. Are you going home now?’

‘Soon.’

He opened the door for her and watched her walk away down the corridor. With her cropped hair and straight shoulders she looked like a young soldier striding along, and for a moment he saw something in her, something of the person she might be when she was alone, not adapting in that sinuous way of hers to other people, not turning herself into a mirror to magnify whatever qualities he — it was generally he — fancied himself to possess. He’d have liked to know her, that secret person, but the mirror was also a shield and she’d be in no hurry to put it down.

Three hours later Paul was pushing open the door of the Café Royal. Lying in the bath at his lodgings, he’d almost changed his mind about going, but the moment he walked into the Domino Room his mood lifted. The tall mirrors in which the heads of smokers, drinkers and talkers were endlessly and elaborately reflected, the laughter, the bare shoulders of the women, the pall of blue smoke above the clustered heads, the sense of witty, significant things being said by interesting people — it was a world away from his poky little rooms in St Pancras. A world away from home, too.

People glanced up at him as he passed, their faces illuminated by the small candles that flickered on every table. Everywhere, moist lips, glimpses of red, wet tongues, gleaming white teeth. How sleek and glossy they all were compared to the creatures who lived in the streets around his lodgings, scurrying about in their soot-laden drizzle, the women so tightly wrapped they seemed to be bundles of clothes walking. This was another England and, passing between the two, he was aware of a moment’s dislocation, not unlike vertigo.

At last he saw Elinor, sitting at a table directly underneath one of the mirrors. She had her back to him, but then caught sight of his reflection in the glass and raised her hand. It was a moment out of time, their two reflections gazing at one another. Then noise, laughter, movement rushed back, as he threaded his way between the last few tables to greet her. ‘Elinor.’