Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

Ray bestowed a cursory glance on Joyce, Iris holding her still for him to see; he grunted something that might have been an indifferent assent. She was embarrassed. She didn’t want him to think she was pushing herself on his attention.

— It’s your wonderful chunky squareness, said Iris. You should wear your hair like this. And some huge primitive earrings, like an Easter Island statue.

Gently, not wanting to offend her friend, Joyce pulled away her head and shook out her hair, blushing.

— I couldn’t get away with it, she said. I’m not beautiful like you.

Ray grunted again.

Joyce did begin to grow her hair, though, so she could wear it in a swinging rope.

* * *

Because ray had so recently been a student himself (he was only five or six years older than Joyce), he mixed with the students as much as with the other teaching staff. The crowd around him and Iris gathered at the Gardenia Café, or at the Friday jazz club, held on a disused floor of one of the old tobacco warehouses, or at one another’s flats and houses for parties. In fine weather, in their breaks, they draped themselves around the statuary of the Empire fountain opposite the entrance to the college: there were photographs of them disporting among the sea folk, someone astride a mermaid’s tail, a face with puffed cheeks pretending to blow a Triton’s trumpet, hands squeezing a pair of verdigris-green bronze breasts. The men in the crowd were noisier and more argumentative than the girls. They were older, many of them had already done their two years’ National Service; the girls mostly deferred to them. And there were more of them, of course. Passionate discussions raged, always through a thick cloud of cigarette and pipe smoke: over art, over jazz, over privilege and class. At that time in the mid-fifties all the men wanted to be working class; they argued over whose parents were most authentically proletarian. Ray Deare’s father was a traveling representative for the Co-op; Dud Mason’s worked in a local print shop; Pete Smith’s had been a milkman but now worked in an office for General Electric. Stefan Jeremy kept quiet; everyone knew his father was a partner in a London firm of architects.

The men leaped up shouting in the Gardenia sometimes, when the argument got too heated, and threw back their chairs and were asked to leave by the waitresses. Some of these waitresses, the attractive ones, would even be invited into the arguments to adjudicate. Dud Mason, big and bear-shaped, untidy curls pushed behind surprisingly tiny ears, would call them over to decide whether there was any point in figurative art any longer. Or Yoyo Myers, who was short and springy, with a face as pretty as a girl’s, and played the tea-chest bass in a skiffle band, would ask them whether they liked, really honestly liked, the sound of modern jazz. Some of the waitresses were students at the art college or the university; some reappeared later in the crowd as girlfriends of the very men they had had to ask to leave.

Joyce could have told everybody that her father had worked as a lowly porter on the railways, but the girls didn’t seem quite as keen to own up to their working-class roots. Everyone had their idea of a rough-hewn male hero with cap and muffler and coat collar turned up (men at the art college turned their collars up), but there didn’t seem to be any glamorous aura attached to his female equivalent. The right match for the rough-hewn male was a soignée and worldly-wise female (who would perhaps tactfully temper his passions and smooth his rough edges). Lenny Barnes, for instance, made no efforts to cover up the fact that she’d been to finishing school in Switzerland. It was all a scream and ridiculously silly; she told stories about how they walked around with books on their heads and practiced getting out of cars. There was actually a false car seat and a false door for them to practice with.

— I mean, as if people who haven’t been to finishing school are always knocking themselves out when they do it, or falling in the gutter or something. Or perhaps they can never get out of cars at all and just have to drive round and round in them forever.

Lenny would add casually, though, that of course you did learn a few things at a place like that, and she supposed it gave you a certain confidence.

The girls didn’t argue as heatedly as the men. Sometimes they were funny and made everybody laugh, or sometimes they lapsed out of the arguments into their own talk, the sort of talk the men disapproved of: who had fallen for whom, who was going with whom; scandal about someone pregnant, or envious gossip about some couple getting married. The men didn’t mind hearing that, say, Pete Smith had gone to bed with Sonia Kirschbaum; there was a whole code of response to that: a teasing acclaim for the man next time he was spotted, a smoky look of new appraisal at the girl. But they didn’t want to discuss it, to explore its implications. Certain less good-looking girls who went to bed with too many of the men got a reputation and were spoken of with mock horror, the men pretending to be on the run from their predatory and smothering attentions. The other girls laughed at this.

Iris didn’t gossip; she would sit cross-legged, even on the tall stools in the Gardenia, her chin in her hands, absorbed in listening to what Ray was saying.

— He’s a genius, she told people flatly.

If Ray heard her he looked uncomfortable. Some of the others thought Iris was affected and took against the proprietary way she talked about Ray, as if she were the priestess at his shrine. They all had high hopes of him, however: his inventiveness, his forceful different opinions, his charm. He was part of the promise they all held on to, that what was going on at the college would count for something later.

Pete Smith told Iris that genius was an invention of bourgeois individualism, and that art could only become meaningful again when the artist was restored to his position as the anonymous chronicler of the collective. Iris smiled her slow enigmatic smile, lowering eyelids painted with thick black lines, tapping one of her Sobranie Black cigarettes out of the pack.

— Pete, she said, that’s such a nice picture, all the happy workers making their art together, each one putting in his little bit. But I’m afraid Nature isn’t so fair as you, she doesn’t make everybody just the same. How can you explain that the mark one man makes upon the paper is vivid with life, while another man can only make something secondhand?

Pete, who was lean and intense with a swept-back mane of hair and horn-rimmed glasses, shrugged coldly, taking this as a comment on his own work.

— I’m not interested in the man, he said, I want to feel history forcing its way into the art, destroying individuality, imposing itself ruthlessly.

Iris shook her head sorrowfully at him.

— You know, you have to love things in order to paint them.

— That sort of idea makes me sick, said Pete.

* * *

Joyce came to the college knowing next to nothing about painting. Her place had been awarded on the basis of the folder of work she had done at school. She had never been to an art exhibition. She knew the paintings in the city museum: although the Holman Hunts and the Ford Madox Browns and the Frederick Leightons melted her and set her dreaming, she understood quickly that she was not supposed to like them. The prints and pages torn out of magazines and pinned up on the walls in Miss Leonard’s art room at school had given her little inexplicable blasts and blazes of van Gogh and Matisse and Utrillo before she knew who they were. Even now she was at college, she couldn’t afford to buy art books; none of them could. When she got the chance — Ray and Iris had some books, and there was a college library — she pored over the reproductions, trying to make sense of what they taught in the Art History classes. She felt at sea amid such acres and centuries of work. There were whole centuries of religious paintings and fat nudes that she couldn’t make herself sympathetic to; they seemed to her stuffy and affected. It was so much easier to get excited about the modern things. Then Iris made her look at Piero della Francesca and Giotto and love them; she came to think of the trecento as a sort of Eden of innocence in art before the long fall into falsity.