Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

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.