Everything Will Be All Right

Three

Ray and Iris Deare were one of the couples everyone wanted to know. They were both painters. As soon as Ray finished studying Fine Art at the college he had been invited to join the teaching staff; he taught drawing to Joyce in her second year. She was terrified of him, always imagining how impatient he must feel at having to be bothered with her flawed work. There were others in the class, talented and confident, with whom Ray carried on a dialogue she greedily listened in on and soaked up: Cézanne’s petite sensation, the difference between Picasso’s and Braque’s Cubist experiments, the importance of the spaces between the shapes, the need for a pencil no harder than HB and no softer than B, Degas’s lithographs of prostitutes. The first time she heard her teacher use the word “prostitute” casually, as if it was just another fact in the world, Joyce felt something crumble in the pit of her stomach, choking and intoxicating her.

Ray hardly ever spoke to her directly, even when sometimes he reached across her shoulder to change something in her drawing, so that his tweedy rough sleeve was against her cheek for a few moments and she could smell his cold pipe in his pocket. He was untidy, shortish, with a crumpled lyrical face and brown curly hair; his wet brown eyes might have been doglike, pleading and needy, except that they were always veiled with irony and jokes.

— Miss Stevenson, he said to her once, you’re not looking. You’re only drawing what you think is there. Don’t think. You have to learn to be stupid in order to draw.

Joyce didn’t mind. She knew what he meant. She liked the invitation to be stupid. She practiced losing herself in the quiet of the life room, where the intent soft patter of pencils and charcoal was necessary and soothing as breathing. If anyone spoke, it woke her as if from a dream.

Iris Deare was training to be a primary school teacher. In the beginning it was Iris whom Joyce was in love with, at least as much as Ray. It was Iris who invited her round to visit them at their flat perched high on the first floor of one of the old steep Georgian terraces that overhung the river in Hilltop. In the sitting room — the lounge, Joyce learned to call it — there were three floor-length sash windows. Joyce had never seen anything like this room before; it was an inspiration. The floorboards were painted black, the walls were gray and hung with paintings and drawings and prints wherever there was space; nothing in the room was there because it was useful but only if it was interesting or beautiful. A huge old antique chaise longue stood along the back wall, its leather ripped and its horsehair stuffing leaking out; it was heaped with cushions, embroidered oriental ones and homemade ones covered in Liberty fabrics or batik prints Iris had done herself. In one corner of the room stood an old rocking horse with its paint washed off and its mane and tail worn down to stubble: Iris had found it put out with the rubbish in the street.

— Poor old love, she said crooningly, rubbing the horse’s stubble with her cheek, kissing his flaring nostrils that had once been brilliant red, we think he’s a magnificent charger still, don’t we?

One end of the long room, beyond a sagging screen of carved oriental wood, was given over to be Ray’s studio. The flat always smelled of paint and turps. There were no curtains at any of the windows: Joyce couldn’t imagine how that felt, never being able to close yourself off from being seen.

— Why would you want to shut that out? Iris asked reasonably, gesturing to the view of pale tiered wedding-cake terraces, steeply dropping woods, the twisting ribbon of the river, the cranes of the city docks (neglected because most of the traffic had gone to the port at the river’s mouth where Joyce’s uncle worked). Beyond the river, spreading to the hills in the distance, the flat plain was built up with Victorian terraces, warehouses, and the sprawling tobacco factory. It was scarred with ruined churches and waste plots where the bombs had fallen.

Iris made coffee in a little metal pot that sat on the gas ring, real coffee, which Joyce had only ever tasted in France. It was bitter and thick, not like she remembered it, but she swallowed it down as best she could, eagerly, like an initiation.

— Look, Ray, said Iris, isn’t she just one of those Epstein bronze heads?

Ray was stretched out on the chaise longue reading the newspaper with his shoes off, bright yellow socks showing a hole. Iris swept Joyce’s hair up and held it in a twisted knot on top of her head; she took Joyce’s chin in her fingers and pushed her face round to present her profile. Iris’s hands were very fine-boned, like all of her; she was dark and tiny with a miniature perfection Joyce yearned for: creamy pale skin, high cheekbones, slanting interrogative eyebrows, a tense high rib cage, a long swinging rope of dark hair down her back. She smelled of the unusual French soap she used, made with honey and almonds; her nails were perfectly shaped and painted a dark crimson like her lipstick. Her slender fingers were weighted down with huge exotic rings she’d found for next to nothing in junk shops. Joyce knew she would have passed over these rings if she’d been looking, thinking they were brash and cheap, not seeing how clever and striking they could be if you knew how to carry them off.

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.

Everything Ray Deare did made Joyce sure he was a genius. She listened to him in order to learn about life as well as painting. She had never heard anyone say the things he said. He said that art was play and that play was the truth of life, more real than work, duty, learning. He said he was ashamed of the dullness of obedient easel art, schooled and tamed. He said that sex was the true revolutionary act of play, and sex had to be put back into painting. Painting and sculpture were the only forms capable of keeping faith with the truth of the body. (Joyce surreptitiously glanced at Iris when Ray talked about sex, wondering whether she would give away any sign of their intimate life. Iris’s wide gaze at her husband never faltered; she didn’t even smile.) He said that an artist had to be an outsider in his own society in order to be any good, that art had to welcome every intimation that came out of the dark. He said the 1946 exhibition of Picasso at the V and A had changed his idea of art as violently and immediately as a collision with a charging bull, and anyone who thought Picasso had wasted his talent was an idiot without eyes. Or balls. He didn’t use quite these words in class, of course, but afterward, in the Gardenia or the jazz club.

He was often the noisiest and most extravagant in the crowd, and even when he was putting forward his serious view of things he waved his hands around and jumped out of his chair in such a way that you knew he was aware that there was something comical and exaggerated in his performance. He didn’t always say sensible or serious things. Sometimes you could tell he took a position merely for the sake of arguing it: that illustrations in women’s magazines should be forbidden by law or that the art market should be nationalized. When she first visited him and Iris in the flat, Joyce was disappointed. Ray seemed gloomy and was mostly silent, or he spoke with Iris about ordinary things Joyce had hardly expected him to know about: sandwich pickle they’d run out of, a shirt that needed ironing, or some fuse wire he wanted her to buy. (Joyce thought it might be for artistic purposes, but no, he just needed to repair a fuse.) She soon came to feel the thrill, though, of touching up against this tender material underside to his mysterious artist’s life. Anyway, it was a good job that Ray ignored her and left her and Iris alone to chatter. The idea of his asking her directly what she thought about anything made her hands clammy.

Ray’s paintings frightened her too. They were mostly paintings of people (this was what the college was known for; anyone who wanted to paint abstracts went to the Slade or St. Martin’s). They were nudes or portraits of friends; occasionally they were practice studies of fruit or flowers, or a bit of broken wall on a bomb site with weeds growing out of it. The subjects were elongated, squeezed, their faces hollowed, the eyes dark pits; his palette was muddy, browns and olive greens and creams, with a red he seemed to use to show energy (Iris explained this). Often there was red on the nipples of the nudes or between their legs. In the paintings of men friends a red light often hovered around the head like the tension of thought. There were a number of paintings of Iris, unmistakable despite the distortion because of the slanting lines of her face, like a bird, and the long ponytail: some nudes, some heads, one of her reading a book, one that seemed to be of her painting, splodges of jewel-like color squeezed on her opened hand as if it were a palette.

Whenever she found herself alone with one of his nudes, Joyce stared greedily at his treatment of the breasts, the belly, the mound of pubic hair; the swirling thick brushstrokes made the flesh into a rich bitter pudding, pawed and stretched the female shape into an exposing, arousing ugliness, with breasts slopped liquidly sideways or hanging loosely. She could see they were beautiful. The heaped-on thick pinks and creams and greens were a representation of how these bodies were pleasuring and powerful. Yet she felt a frisson of fear, as well as exhilaration, at the idea that her flesh might ever be stripped and seen like this. This picture of femaleness fought hard, in her idea of herself, with a different picture she clung to: the one derived from magazines and films, of flesh safely contained inside its flawless powdered skin, suggested by shadows under clinging clothes, contoured and lyrical and hidden.

* * *

The hours Joyce spent drawing in the long life room made her very happy. The room was austere and dilapidated, lit by tall windows on its northwest side, with off-white walls and bare floorboards sanded smooth by the caretaker, Mr. Bassett, with his sawdust and broom. You could draw from the plaster casts of Greek and Renaissance sculptures and bronzes that stood around, or from the skeleton who hung in her little sentry box at one end of the room, or you could draw from the live models, usually Mrs. Carey or Miss Alfred, who undressed in their “cupboard” and were kept warm with electric panel heaters in winter. Nothing must be allowed to move or change while you drew, even when everyone took a break: chalk marks were made for where the model’s chair and her feet and elbows went; you made marks for your own position, too, and for the “donkey,” the trestle where you rested your drawing board.

In the breaks the students smoked and leaned out of the windows overlooking the busy shopping street; or they warmed themselves against the fat old radiators. The models wrapped themselves in their kimonos. Some of them were thin and destitute-looking, brought in “off the streets,” as Pete Smith said: he called them casualties of the postwar austerity. Others were confident and extraordinary. Jean Alfred, who figured in so many drawings and paintings by the students and the teachers at the college, was said to have Gypsy blood in her; she was tall with a big square mouth and slanting cheekbones. She dated some of the best students and was rumored to be carrying on an affair with one of the older lecturers, as well as having a Gypsy boyfriend of her own. Her mother worked as a cleaner at the college in the evenings; they lived together in Churchtown, which was seedy and glamorously rough.

Joyce’s drawing improved. She learned to spend two and a half hours on an ear and a bit of neck, connecting them with the background, getting them right. She entered into a sort of trance as she worked, absorbed in seeing and translating, shocked if the teacher interrupted to show her something or if anyone new came pushing into the room past the thick black burlap curtain that hung inside the door to shut out sound and light and curious passersby. She did understand, though, that drawing was supposed to be a preparation for something else. It seemed a great problem that she didn’t really have any subject she urgently needed to paint. Some of the others were so sure already: Stefan Jeremy with his sooty cityscapes, Yoyo Myers with his weird bug-eyed portraits, Mary Anderson with her studies of theaters and circuses.

It felt as if this problem of her lack of a subject was all tangled up with something incomplete as yet in Joyce’s life with the crowd. She wasn’t clear what role she was supposed to play with them. They partly adopted her as a little pet, small and tidy and obliging and good fun, always ready with her admiration for other people’s work. They called her Ginger, although her hair wasn’t really ginger but a pale golden red. Yoyo took a handful of it and sifted through, sighing over it, despairing of ever being able to paint it because there were so many different colors: white and gold and auburn and strawberry. In fact, his painting of her head, with his characteristic staring bug eyes, won him the student prize that year and was the first painting he ever sold.

Joyce had been to bed with Yoyo and with a couple of the others too. (“Shagged,” the men called it, but the girls never said that. The word was hopelessly mixed up in Joyce’s mind with dirty old tobacco and the sailors who had muttered things down at the docks.) As soon as she started college she had set about ridding herself of her inexperience; the night she came home after her first time (they were still living in the old house then), she searched her face in her dressing-table mirror for signs of a new womanly allure. Her deflowering had not been in the least the bloody and momentous thing she had expected from her novel reading. So this was what people really wanted of one another; this act of playful childlike gratifications was the grown-up secret hidden under so much stuffy dullness! Everyone at college was going to bed with everyone else. At the beginning of the second year when they were queuing to reregister, Lenny Barnes pretended to start up an extra line and stood at the head of it, calling out, “Anyone queue here who’s still a virgin!”

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 folding 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 evening, 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.

Ray and Pete were arguing about Giacometti, and then about socialism, and then about primitive art. Ray still had his brown face but he had taken off his turban and his mustache. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor with his back to the rows of Penguin and Pelican paperbacks on bookshelves made of painted planks and bricks. Sometimes he waved his pipe dramatically in the air as if he were drawing things; sometimes he closed his eyes, sucking on it. Joyce remembered that he was only twenty-five or — six; when he was teaching she always thought of him as immeasurably older than herself. His eyelids were deep and fine-skinned, crinkled; the flesh on his face was soft and thick; his mouth was red, with a lower lip so swollen it looked as if he had been stung. Someone had said that with his curls and that soft mouth he looked like a cross baby. He was always completely absorbed in whatever one thing he was doing: pouring whisky, constructing an argument, painting. If he tried, say, to pour coffee and talk at the same time, then Iris had to unpick the coffeepot apologetically out of his hands before it got cold.

— What we have to do, he was shouting, is get right up close to Africa. You know, like getting up close to one of those totem figures, one of those really tall ones, with teeth and eyes and bits of hide and bone. We’ve got to frighten ourselves, that’s the truth. All the old taboos, all the old forbidden things. You’ve got to cut through all these layers of fuss, of baby clothes, and all this stuffing, all this stuffy upholstered old Europe with its taboos and its dead skin.

— And what about the Empire? Pete shouted back. What about what’s happening in Kenya? What kind of a civilization is that?

— That’s exactly it, that’s exactly it, said Ray, that’s exactly what I’m trying to say.

— You’re not making any sense at all. Joyce laughed at them.

— We are, Pete said indignantly. You just don’t properly understand what it is we’re talking about.

When Gillian and Mary had left in their taxi, Iris stood up and said she was going to bed. Joyce thought that she had better go to bed too, although she didn’t really want to; she felt her energy was inexhaustible and she was sure she would lie awake listening to the talk through the wall. The men were passing the whisky round and changing the record. (—You’ve got to hear this, Ray said. This is raw jazz, really raw, really down to the bone, nothing pretty about this.) It would seem presumptuous to stay up without Iris and be the only girl.

The bed in the spare room was left as it must have been when Ray last slept in there. Joyce assured Iris that she didn’t mind not having clean sheets; it had clearly not occurred to Iris that anyone might. Her face was dislocated by a yawn so deep she hardly seemed to hear Joyce saying good night. Joyce undressed, listening to the music and the rumbling of voices through the wall. She had brought her pajamas and her toothbrush in a bag; when she had taken off all her things (thinking that it was the second time she had been naked in this room), she realized she had left the bag in the lounge but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t cold. She climbed in between the sheets in her bare skin and must have fallen asleep as soon as she put her head on the pillow.

* * *

When she woke up she had no idea how long she had been in there or how many hours the others had gone on talking; the lounge was silent now and the flat was dark. What she knew was that someone was in bed with her: a naked man. She could feel him bulky and hot and soft beside her; she could smell him, a spicy mix of sweat and spirits and smoke and something personal, a green smell like cut grass. She was sure the man was asleep because he was breathing through his mouth, heavily, in a broken snorting pattern; he must be lying on his back. She too was on her back. She had no idea how long he might have been there. In her dreams, perhaps, she had been aware of an arrival, of a stirring of accommodation to another presence. In her dreams she must have let him climb in, as if this were something understood between them. It was his snorting breath that had waked her.

It was so dark she could not see anything, not her own hand in front of her eyes, let alone the face of the man whose heat was radiating against her where her thigh touched his. And yet, in spite of the dark, in truth she knew immediately who he was. (It was not only her thigh that touched him. She could feel under the toes of her left foot the hairy calf of his right leg, and his right arm was thrown heavily, carelessly, across her belly, palm up. Vividly, too, she was aware of them circulating the same air in their noisy breathing; she could taste the whisky in it.) It would have made perfect sense for it to be Yoyo; although it wasn’t supposed to be common knowledge that they had slept together, he might have been tempted by such a lucky opportunity as this, might have pretended to settle down on the floor in the lounge and then crept into her room later. But Yoyo would surely have wakened her. And anyway, she never for one moment thought it was Yoyo, whose presence in a bed was light and neat as a boy’s. She put her hand to where this man’s head should be on the pillow and felt curls, damp and short, and then with her fingers felt bits of a face, incomprehensible in its arrangements in the pitch dark but known to her, known vividly.

She leaped up into a sitting position, pulling away from where she touched against him as if she was burned.

— Mr. Deare, she hissed, Mr. Deare! Wake up! You’ve made a terrible mistake. You’ve come to the wrong bed. I’m in here.

For a long moment there was no response, only a whistling exhalation on a different prolonged note. Then the snoring broke off and he also sat up abruptly in alarm; he grabbed her painfully tightly by the shoulders, as if she needed protecting from something, or he did.

— Who are you? he whispered urgently into the dark.

— It’s Joyce, she said, Joyce Stevenson.

— And what am I doing in here?

— I think you made a mistake. You came to bed, and you forgot that Iris said I could stay the night.

— Jesus Christ. I wasn’t asleep?

— You were. You must have gone right off to sleep. Then I woke up.

— Jesus Christ.

It was so strange that they couldn’t see each other, although he held her tightly in his hands for these few minutes while they spoke. He groaned, a groan out of all proportion to what had happened: as if he confronted a wholesale indictment of his irresponsibility, his drunkenness, his insensitivity.

— I’m such an idiot, he urgently whispered at her.

— No, not at all, it was an easy mistake to make; it doesn’t matter.

— It does, it does, he hissed, insisting. What should I do now?

— Just go back to your own bed. There’s no need for us to mention anything to Iris. There’s nothing to mention.

— All right, he said, are you sure?

— Of course I’m sure. Nothing’s happened.

— All right. If you’re quite sure.

As he let go of her and moved to feel his way out of the bed, his right hand fell from her shoulder — palm open, hot and damp from where he had gripped her — and brushed quickly across her breasts, so quickly she couldn’t be sure whether it was an accident or not.

— Good night then, she said into the dark. Don’t worry about it.

— You’re very good to make no fuss. I hope I’ve got all my clothes.

— If there’s anything here in the morning I’ll put it out on the landing.

— I suppose this is all really very funny.

— It is, she whispered firmly. It’s terribly funny.

When he had gone she lay awake, parched and nauseated with hangover, feverish with consciousness of what had happened. She had done nothing to be ashamed of, and yet she felt that something precious had been spoiled; she wished she never had to see Ray Deare again. She also wished she dared to slip into the lounge and fetch her pajamas out of her bag, so she could cover herself up; her naked breasts felt hot and heavy and she ached from imagining, over and over, although she forbade herself, his hand across her front.

* * *

The next day, at about three o’clock in the afternoon, someone rang the doorbell of the Stevenson flat in Benteaston.

They were all at home. Lil and Joyce and Ann were washing up Sunday dinner. Martin was excused from washing up in return for polishing shoes; he had these spread out on sheets of newspaper in the middle of the carpet in the front room and put on a great appearance of rubbing and buffing every time one of them came through, although it was obvious he was mostly engaged in reading all the articles in the paper. He read things out to them from time to time.

— Listen to this. “House painter hypnotizes woman while her teeth are extracted.”

Lil, who had read the paper through already that morning, obliged by exclaiming in astonished sympathy.

—“Widow leaves six thousand pounds, car, house, and wines to chauffeur.” “Man digging in garden finds unexploded bomb.”

Ann and Joyce ignored him. They got through the mountain of dirty dishes and pans in a trance of uncommunicative efficiency, only scowling if they bumped up against each other in the cramped little kitchen while they were putting things away. It was Joyce who hung her soggy tea towel over her shoulder and went to see who was at the door. Sometimes some of her college friends came over on Sunday afternoons to take her out for a walk on the heath.

Ray Deare stood on the path, hangdog and miserable, with his shoulders hunched up and his hands thrust into the pockets of his tweed jacket. Joyce hadn’t seen him again since she’d found him in her bed; she had slipped out of the Deares’ flat early in the morning before anyone was up. There were traces of brown makeup in front of Ray’s ears and in his eyebrows. It was a muffled gray day, cool for summer, very still. In the tiny paved front garden the blooms on the aged pink standard rose that Lil had tried to prune into shape sagged gloomily earthward, turning brown before they’d opened.

— I couldn’t believe you’d just gone, he said. You left this. I thought I’d better bring it.

He held out the little pink-painted bag she had forgotten, with her pajamas and toothbrush inside. Joyce supposed he was miserable because she had blundered into his sacred privacy, even though it was through no fault of her own. There were things about him that he must know she would not be able to forget: his yielding hot soft flesh; his smell close up, sweet and ripe like grass; his humiliating shy panic when he discovered his mistake. And now nothing that she did would ever be right for him again. She wondered how he’d found out where she lived.

The woman from the flat upstairs was hanging over the banisters with curiosity, her hair in curlers and a net.

— Is it for you, dear? Joyce reassured her it was, but she made no move to retreat.

— I just had to come and apologize for yesterday, Ray said.

— There was really no need. Do you want to come in?

Even as Joyce offered this and he accepted it she realized what a mistake she was making. There was nowhere in the flat she could take him. The tiny hall was windowless and half filled with the hallstand. The whole place reeked: of cabbage, boiled bacon, the wet cloths off the steamed pudding, shoe polish. She led the way into the front room and then stood helplessly. Martin’s polishing had spread right out across the floor; there was no way to walk round him, and anyway, she could hardly have taken Ray into the bedroom.

— How about this? Martin read with glee, partly for the benefit of the visitor. “Woman who died: ‘Nothing wrong.’”

Lil came out of the kitchen, wiping her wet red hands on her apron.

— Come on in, pet, she said. You’re too late for dinner. Would you like a bit of cold bacon?

— Oh, no, said Joyce, he wouldn’t.

— I won’t, thank you, said Ray with weary politeness. I’m not hungry.

Since they moved into town, Lil had got a job working in a cake shop. The frilled caps and aprons she had to wear were draped across a clothes horse on the hearth rug along with the girls’ stockings and brassieres; this normally stood in the kitchen sink when it wasn’t full of dishes.

— Excuse the mess, said Lil cheerfully. Let me lift that bedding off the sofa so you can sit down, and I’ll make us a nice cup of tea.

— This is Mr. Deare, said Joyce. He’s one of my lecturers. This is my mother, and my brother and sister.

— I thought you were just one of Joyce’s chums, said Lil in real dismay.

Joyce thought that Ray ought somehow to have explained himself, to have taken charge of the situation from his position of authority. Couldn’t he at least have said he’d come to talk to her about her work? Instead he stood cowed and desperate looking, as if he might make a dreadful mistake and accept the cup of tea.

— We could clear up in here, offered Lil, flustered. If you need to talk to Joyce. We could all wait in the bedroom.

— I haven’t really come to apologize, said Ray to Joyce, ignoring the others gawping at them. I need to talk to you.

— Actually, I shouldn’t have brought you in, Joyce said then, recklessly. We don’t really have the space, as you can see. I’ll get my coat. We could discuss things as we walk along.

— You’ve still got that tea towel round your neck, said Ann.

Joyce unwound it with superb indifference, then fumbled in the dark in the hallstand for her outdoor shoes.

— Will you be long? said Lil with foreboding.

— Might be.

It didn’t matter that she knew she sounded falsely bright; she would have pretended any brazen thing, just to escape. Efficiently, she steered Ray out into the street.

— Shall I put the kettle on? Lil called after them.

— Don’t bother to wait for us.

They walked up toward the heath. It was an ordinary Sunday. Family groups or couples or absorbed solitary walkers straggled desultorily on Clore Hill, so bustling and purposeful on weekdays but muted now, with its closed shops and its road empty of traffic. Joyce walked as though she were wearing giant boots, the kind that make you take huge mile-long strides with every step; she was leaving her old self behind forever in no time, in a few minutes.

— I love you, Ray was saying. I’ve fallen in love with you.

Of course this was ridiculous.

And yet Joyce was also ready for the possibility that it was true. Secretly, she had probably always believed that if only someone ever uncovered her real self it might command love like this, all at one blow: like a vindication from outside of all the innumerable tiny things that made her up and that otherwise only she would ever know.

* * *

This peremptory absolute need had seized ray deare once or twice before since he had been married to Iris. He recognized the helplessness and the astonishment at his own abjection. Every day he moved safely among women, enjoying the nearness of their bodies, their scent, their various blooming faces: students, models, women passing in the crowd. And then suddenly by some signal, some tiny-seeming word or touch or hint, one of them would separate herself from that background awareness and swell until she filled out all his thoughts, consumingly, swallowing up the point of everything else. It was impossible to work as long as he felt like this. Impossible to eat or to think, at least until something was settled one way or the other.

Joyce laughed out loud at him, shaking her head.

— Don’t be ridiculous, she said.

Her earrings and her ponytail swung excitedly. She had put on a suede jacket to come out with him and knotted a scarf jauntily round her neck, a beige silk one decorated with a pattern of coins: her clothes were always easily stylish; she made no fuss. How unusual it was, to have that red hair with a skin so creamy pale and clear, even with a hint of blue vein at the temple. He grasped at the top of her arm as they walked, wishing they weren’t hurrying, longing to be with her somewhere alone where he could convince her, not absurdly on the public street; he was furious with anger at everyone they passed who looked at them.

This wasn’t exactly like those other times. With those other girls he had known, even while he was burning up for them, that he wasn’t afraid; he could pull himself back if he wanted.

— Do you think I’m ridiculous? Do you really think that?

He searched her face, trying to read her expression. Probably she thought he was stuffy and ancient. She might be disgusted because he had touched her last night; for all he knew she was a virgin and it had been her first contact with a naked man. Perhaps he had smelled, or snored, while he lay beside her.

— Well, no, of course you’re not a ridiculous person.

— I love you. Everything about you.

He had not undressed and lain beside her last night because he had had too much to drink and had forgotten she was staying. It wasn’t even because he had been swollen and agitated with desire for her, although he was now, hardly knowing where they were walking to or what he was saying. He had lain beside her because she was the one who matched him, the one he ought to be lying down with every night of his life. He’d only known that for a few hours, but it seemed quite certain. He tried to explain to her.

— I chose you, without knowing what I was doing.

— That wasn’t what I thought, she said. I thought you’d hate me!

— Hate you! If you only knew!

She covered her face with her fingers. He couldn’t see if she was smiling or distraught at him.

— Whatever will my family think?

She was only a child. He needed to remember that. He must treat her with absolute tenderness. The idea of how young she was pricked his eyes with tears.

— I don’t care, he said. I had to tell you. I don’t care what they think.

They reached the top of the hill and set off across the heath for the water tower with its ring of trees, then down into the lumpy secretive craters where the bombs were supposed to have fallen. It was a dull afternoon. He took her hand — warm, small, strong — and pulled to try and slow her down. She let her hand stay in his. In here it seemed possible for him to try to kiss her. If they emerged from the craters to the level grass again he’d have lost his chance.

— You don’t know me well enough to be in love with me, she said.

— I don’t need to know you. Not in the way you mean.

— But I’m not like you. I’m not brilliant or an important artist or anything.

— That’s exactly it. I don’t want you to be those things. You’re real. It’s so real. You’re not trying to be something else.

The path became too narrow for them to walk side by side. She went first and he followed, frowning, tripping over the bramble roots that grew across the dirt, not daring to reach out for her. He stared at her body moving under her clothes. Surely she had modeled for him once or twice; he tried to remember the detail of how her buttocks curved generously from her narrow waist, how her wide thighs slanted down into her knees. He couldn’t believe that he had not loved her then, when he was drawing her.

The idea of Iris was stuck in his mind, of course, quivering and sore like a dark poisoned splinter. Iris had strange moods; there were hours at a time she would sit staring at nothing or with her face wet with tears. When she was like this everything he said was wrong; he crept around the flat guiltily or escaped to meet his friends. Involuntarily he pictured her sitting like this now, numbly absorbed in the idea of his treachery, although she couldn’t actually know about it yet.

— You have a lovely nature, he said, stumbling after Joyce. Mine is so stupid and so ugly. You don’t know me. If you knew me, you wouldn’t want me.

— I know your paintings, she said.

— It’s true. You know my paintings. That’s all you need to know. You see? You understand everything, without even trying.

She stopped still on the path ahead of him.

— All right, she said softly.

He wasn’t sure at first if he had heard her properly. He couldn’t see her face.

— All right, then.

He came up behind her and put his arms around her, reaching inside her jacket so that her breasts were in his hands, springy and jutting in the stiff brassiere she wore under her wool sweater; he kissed her neck on the nape and behind her ears, with the soft tail of her hair in his face. She smelled of bacon and syrup with traces of perfume from last night, wholesome and good. He stood kissing her for long minutes like that, pressing her breasts with his palms, before she turned round in his arms and kissed him back full on his mouth, with a boldness that must mean she had some experience in such things (which after all was probably a relief). Now he couldn’t believe that last night they had lain side by side and he had let her send him back to sleep with Iris.

A man walking his dog had to step into the long grass to avoid them where they blocked the path, grumbling at them disapprovingly.

— We can’t ever go to your flat, Joyce said matter-of-factly in his ear. And you’ve seen mine. We won’t ever be able to be alone, you know.

He suggested something hesitantly, fearful she might be offended.

— I’ve got keys to my parents’ house. They’re away at Torquay with my sister for a week’s holiday. I’m looking after the cat.

She put up no fight at all. He felt her give way; she sagged heavily against him.

— When? she said. When can we go there?

— I don’t know. What about your mother?

— She’ll be all right. Is it far?

— The other side of Benteaston, in St. Peter’s. About forty minutes’ walk.

— Do you have the key on you?

— Yes, he said, feeling in his jacket pocket. Oh, God. And some scraps for the cat.

He pulled out the greasy package done up in waxed bread wrappings that Iris had given him to take.

— I’d forgotten all about these.

— You won’t ever be able to talk again about my lovely nature, Joyce said, with her face pressed against his shoulder. Don’t think I don’t know what I’m doing, deceiving Iris. Don’t think I don’t know it’s wrong.

— We aren’t going to deceive her, Ray said. I’m going to tell her. In the next few days I’m going to tell her. You’re the one. I’m going to marry you.

He hadn’t known this was true until the words were out.

He was full of fear of Iris — the idea of her and of what was going to have to happen to her seemed wrapped in thick and ugly shadows. He was also angry at her, because she made what he had to do so difficult.

— Don’t be silly, Joyce said, without lifting her head from his shoulder to see his face, laughing muffledly, happily. Don’t be so silly. It can’t be true.

* * *

Joyce hadn’t thought at all about his parents’ house while they were on their way there. It had been merely their destination, aimed at blindly as they hurried with their burning purpose along the quiet Sunday streets. (Really, she pictured them burning with it, the suburban pavements along which they passed scorched and flaming behind them.) She had imagined how they would turn to each other once they were alone at last, but she had not imagined any particular setting for this clinching encounter, no furniture or rooms. She knew things about his family that should have prepared her for just the kind of place it was: his father working for the Co-op, his mother with her whist drives, his sister at secretarial college. He had dropped her hand as they approached; of course, the neighbors knew him and would know his wife. A tall tabby hailed him in a hoarse accusing meow from where it waited on the doorstep beyond a little green-painted gate, and he spoke back to it, apologizing for being late. The house was on a corner in a quiet avenue of similar houses, fringed fawn blinds at its windows, a striped sun awning rolled up above the front door, two apple trees and an Anderson shelter in the back garden. If it had been a slum, with cracks in the walls and damp running down and crusts of bread on the floor, Joyce would have taken it in her stride. But she stopped short in the entrance hall when they had shut the front door behind them, disconcerted because it was so ordinary.

The hall was dim, the blinds were drawn; spilled drops of sapphire and ruby glowed on the tiled floor where light came through the stained glass in the porch. With Timmy the cat winding under his feet, Ray led her through a dining room with a tall wooden over-mantel and a ticking clock and brass fire irons; pools of pale light were collected on the high-polished table and sideboard. There were dark squares and rectangles of paintings hung by chains from the picture rail, but Joyce knew without looking that they weren’t Ray’s or anything remotely like Ray’s; they were cows wading in brooks rusty with sunset light or yearning shepherdesses on the moors. It wasn’t quite like anywhere that Joyce herself had ever lived: more — much more — comfortably furnished and prosperous than anything Lil had ever been able to afford; not as eccentric and distinguished and ramshackle as the old house in the estuary; more old-fashioned than Aunt Vera’s bright flat with its pale blue Formica kitchen. She watched Ray hunting in a cupboard in the breakfast room for a plate to put the cat’s scraps on. He was still mysterious, the artist with the gift of knowledge. But he was also, after all, just the boy who had grown up in this house, and played with his sister under the shelter, and knew where the forks were kept and where the matches were, and had been given, like her own brother, a printing set or a penknife for Christmas. (He showed her afterward where he had in fact tried out his new penknife, years before, on the arm of his mother’s leather-covered chair.) This vision of his familiarity, like a vision of their closeness to come, was more shocking to her, more absolutely a revolution in her apprehension of everything, than even the flame of excitement as she waited for him to take her upstairs and make love to her.

— I do know you, she said into his neck, wrapping herself about him from behind while he washed his hands at the kitchen sink. I do know who you are.

— I know you do, said Ray, that’s why I’ve chosen you.

— Sometimes you’ll wish I didn’t. You’ll wish I was someone more remote and lofty minded.

— At this moment, he said, I can’t contemplate it. Not with you pressed up against me like that.

He brought sheets, and they lay down under a green silk eiderdown in his old room, which was papered with a pattern of green trellis hung with baskets of flowers. Joyce said she would launder the sheets and iron them before his mother came back. Probably it was strange for him, this bringing her here to his childhood bedroom; he was more shy and self-doubting than she had imagined, after all his talk. They didn’t put on any lights or draw the curtains, in case the neighbors saw. Ray brought in a portable enamel paraffin stove; as the hours passed and it grew dark outside, an image of the pattern of diamonds cut in the top of the stove was cast tremblingly onto the slanting ceiling.

* * *

Joyce changed her mind, later, about iris’s paintings. years later she bought one of Iris’s small oils that she saw in an exhibition of local artists. This was when all the turmoil was behind them, all the shouting and weeping and shamed relatives and clumsy ugly self-justification; they had arrived by then at a point where she and Iris could even occasionally meet at the same parties, although they ignored each other. Iris was painting under her maiden name, Iris Neave, although she did remarry (she never had children). She must have recovered from the crisis of confidence in her work that she had once spoken of to Joyce.

The painting was of a little cream jug and a spoon on a white tray cloth edged with lace. It was curious how Iris, who was no good with real food or hospitality (Joyce was the one who turned out to be good at these things), should choose so consistently to paint domestic objects: fruit and cakes and labeled jars of jam; teapots and sugar tongs and plates of nuts and cheese.

— Dainty, said Ray, so dainty it makes me want to smash something. How can she still want to paint as if the world hasn’t changed? Tray cloth indeed! Who uses a tray cloth these days? It’s too pretty; don’t you think it’s saccharine and mendacious? (It was he who seemed to have clung on longer to the need to justify himself: he wasn’t ever very nice about Iris.)

But Joyce didn’t think so, although she didn’t try to explain and didn’t really even examine for herself what it was she liked about the picture. If she happened to glance at it, it was a soothing still point in her busy days. She liked the careful continence of the brushstrokes. She liked its irony (Iris surely knew the tray cloth was old-fashioned?). She liked the idea that the cream was held there inside the jug and never poured.