The Mistressclass Read online

  She took them out reverently, one by one; she caressed them with a yellow duster; she dipped the tip of a damp muslin cloth around the backs of their necks, behind their ears. Her good children who did not scream or kick or wet their beds. They did not grizzle or bite when thwarted. The little gods had smooth faces, tearless and unflushed. They were delicate; porcelain flesh, porcelain bones; needed constant nursing and attention. His mother’s hands cupped them protectively. Their paleness gleamed against the dark mahogany of the cupboard doors.

  They were all his mother’s favourites. Girls and boys both. Some of the boys wore hunting dress, carried whips and horns, dogs frothing at their booted feet. They posed on silvery rocks frilled with tiny coloured flowers. The girls strode in pleated tunics and matched arrows to stretched bows. They tiptoed on green mounds and aimed at invisible prey. One of the boy figurines was content just to watch the others. He was like an older brother who’d never hit or tease you. He was sweet-faced, dreamy-looking, wearing a blue jacket, a big lacy collar, and long black trousers. The forefinger of his left hand was tip-tilted to his chin. Legs crossed at the ankle, he leaned against a stumpy white column, glancing at the open book balanced there. His hair curled; his hat was flung down beside him. In his left hand he carried a quill pen. Under his feet was a notice with his name on: Shelley. A girl’s name. That was why his mother loved him so much. Adam’s mother smoothed the invisible dust from his shoulders, stroked him all over.

  Adam pointed to the china cabinet.

  —Can I have him?

  —No, darling, said his mother: they’re not for children. They’re not toys.

  His mother mooned and dreamed. Hummed to herself; doting on her figurines; hidden inside a cocoon of porcelain. Adam waited until she’d left the room to answer the telephone in the hall, leaving the door of the cabinet open. Then he plucked up those china children one by one by the feet and smashed their heads against the savage edge of the cabinet to fly apart. The gut pleasure and relief of that crack, shatter, splintery mess: he too was a giant and he too could explode.

  For one glorious moment he wasn’t sorry. Haloed in freedom. He’d done exactly what he needed to.

  Then his father woke up and roared. His mother ran back in, white-faced. How could you? How could you? His father hit him and she wept.

  He was a spoilt child, they recognised. He’d been their darling, their one and only. Now they sent him away to school; for his spoiled parts to be mended and rubbed smooth. More like punishment, though. That was the story repeated in the prayers in the school chapel: of the fall; the punishment. Man who had danced with the angels now fell, toppled from the topmost rafter bracing the dark heights above the altar; that tower of sky; man stepped out into nothingness, fell, flew spiralling down the coil of air that collapsed and could not hold him up. Man’s thin skin split; spill of his guts: he was splattered broken-necked like fledgling mess on the cold floor. The nave roof arched above Adam, built of angels jammed together with gold nails. He gazed up at it from the cramped pew, sweating and dizzy.

  If you turned the whole place upside-down you could not fall. You could not get lost. The chapel, topsy-turvy, became Noah’s boat. He drew pictures of it in scripture lessons, working out, precisely as possible, the tiered arrangement for the animals above and below decks, where to put the cabins for the people. He coated his parents in gold before taking them on board, sealed them carefully into a tiny cupboard in the fo’c’sle. The statue of his mother was the bigger one. She held her boy, swimming towards her in the sea of her lap, in the crook of her arm, kept them both steady as the gale rocked; she was white-faced because she was seasick. The ark was solidly built; watertight; tilting up and over precipitous waves; his mother did not fall off and she did not break.

  The pictures unreeled, sharp and rapid and gaudy as cartoon films, in his mind; crayon in fist, he couldn’t scrawl them fast enough. Later on he began to write short stories, experiment with sketching one frame at a time.

  Now all he wanted to do was dovetail words together. He dropped out of university in his second year. He worked at labouring jobs while he wrote his first novel. Meanwhile his mother left home and his father got a divorce. He qualified for one more year of grant; took a carpentry course then wrote his second novel. Now he was launched. Art was safely impersonal; held away from himself; separate. Childhood was private; his secret thoughts; remained sealed away in the cupboard. You wouldn’t dream of writing about it. Only blabbering confessional amateurs did that. The doors were firmly shut; no more breakages could occur; you got on with things.

  He yawned. He felt a thick layer of the past lift off his back. Like a wing? Like a muffling coat? To be discarded. Then picked up and looked at. Tight knot of forgotten stuff packed small as a pea, teased out in his hands to become exuberant loops flying and tangling all over the place, then hauled back in like ropes, wound into a skein, woven into a story. He’d done it, like the girl in the fairy tale, weaving coats out of nettles for her brothers, the children of Lir, to cover their wings, to save them before she was burnt to death at the stake, to turn them from swans back into men again. Only she hadn’t finished in time and so one brother had had to keep his single wing. Half swan, half man. Limping. Calling.

  Vinny listened distractedly, fiddling her forefinger against the side of her thumb. While he talked, Adam had avoided her eyes, concentrated on the yellow plastic mustard bottle, the brown sauce bottle, the red ketchup bottle. He enjoyed the gaiety of their colours against the blue and white squares on which they stood. Bright as Noah’s Ark figures bobbing across the sea. He longed for a cigarette. He wondered if Vinny had any on her. She didn’t seem to be carrying a bag. She was wearing an oversized black sweater reaching to her knees, a skirt like a ballerina’s Sylphides frock, its stiff layers of gauzy grey net dotted with brilliants, and black leather biker boots. Her black leather jacket was slung over the back of her chair.

  She was gazing at him affectionately because he’d let her come close. Women liked that. As though they’d won in some sympathy contest. He had to struggle against feeling, in these moments, that they were out to get him, seize his fragile skull between their hands, smash his head against the wall. He knew that really it was the other way round. To protect her he had to hold Vinny off; behind invisible barbed wire. The impulses to violence, to hurting and destroying, must never be told. These you carried stoically inside yourself. The slashing and burning scarred only you. The people you were fond of remained safe, on the other side of your battle-thickened skin. The pain of those attacks inside made you grimace but no-one else need know.

  Vinny reached out her finger and replaced the downturned mouth of her doodle on the glass with a smiling one.

  —What’s so amusing?

  He remembered he’d been looking at her clothes.

  —I like your outfit. Takes me back to the seventies.

  Girls wearing crazy clothes had thronged the literature festivals. All kinds of performers, dressed up in carnival colours and costumes and chiffons. Sometimes there was one big venue; a circus-style tent or a church hall; sometimes you did the pub circuit. Rock music and stand-up comedy and poetry. The novelists had read out chapters of their novels like poems: Adam had sung his work, declaimed it, recited it like parts in a play. Mime artists, trapeze artists, dancers, singers, writers: they’d all shared stages, rowed and fought, got drunk, gone to bed together. The procession of ardent, sexy, passionate girls had tied it all together with gold ribbons. How generous, how easy, those girls were; those Pill-jugglers; how quick to signal their desire and claim their freedom; off with their boots and flounces, naked bodies laid against yours in a trice; so eager to suck your cock, try anal sex, prove themselves willing; up for anything. They fucked in the woods at music festivals, in the long grass on Hampstead Heath, on kitchen tables in squats, in each other’s rumpled beds. Too many of them ever to remember all their names. Except Vinny, of course. And Catherine.

  —Tell me more abou
t your mother, Vinny said: you never have.

  Adam frowned at her.

  —What’s there to tell?

  She’d rejected him. She sent him away to school. Then she ran away herself. A wound too deep to be forgivable. He packed it with ice. He had built walls around himself to keep the hatred out. Then it was all over; done and dealt with. He could grow up and get on with his life.

  Catherine had rescued him from his childhood by respecting his need for distance. She sat cross-legged outside his tower and waved. Had she locked him in and hidden the key? At certain moments hatred would suddenly rise up, shrieking, clattering its wings, like a swan disturbed by a gunshot. Then he had to break free and get out.

  Catherine would certainly not want him to be roaming about, meeting Vinny in cafés on the quiet, talking intimately. Going to exhibitions with her sister was one thing; telling her his secrets was another. Sometimes Catherine was the gamekeeper, stalking him; keeping him within bounds. He told himself that was unfair. But he enjoyed talking to Vinny, despite her probing; in some moods he relished her naïveté, her idealism. She believed that being a writer meant following a vocation. Therefore she had opted not to lead a conventional life. If you did, she’d told him once, laughing, well, that was merely a disguise to keep your enemies off your back while you got on with what truly mattered. Er, like Philip Larkin. Adam had listened to her simplicities and smiled.

  —You got a cigarette? he asked.

  —I thought you were giving up, Vinny said.

  —Can’t talk about my fucking childhood without a cigarette, Adam said.

  They were drinking tea. Cooling to the yellowy colour of clay puddles. He ought to be making a move. He ought to go to Safeway’s and do the shopping, take it home, fly back to his wife on his single, unwieldy wing. Hovering on the pavement outside the café he would be transformed, from swan back into man. He would become Catherine’s husband once more. Faithful as a swan to his mate. He had been faithful to Catherine throughout their marriage. Surely, he said to her in his head: that means something? But those sado-masochistic fantasies she’d been writing were a form of unfaithfulness. That kind of sex, those kind of games, disgusted him. She’d been betraying him, over and over, all these years.

  He seized the words running inside his head and strangled them. Fool to have come out without cigarettes.

  The warmth inside the café made him reluctant to go back into the wet, windy street. The warmth he felt from Vinny. With her he stopped being the stone man he’d been with Catherine all weekend. Vinny breathed life into him, turned him back to flesh and blood. But despite that he couldn’t talk to her anymore about his parents.

  —I’ve got writer’s block, he said: I’m done for. I can’t write a word. I’m too depressed. I’m finished as a writer. That’s why I took on the building job. Nothing to do with research. I just had to have something else to do. I haven’t written a word for six months.

  Then he was on his feet, the bill paid, ushering Vinny out, blinking at the downpour, putting up his umbrella. Crack and twang of the grey fabric as it snapped up, tautened, blocked off the rain. Of course Vinny didn’t carry a brolly. She was shrugging herself into her leather jacket and grumbling at him not to rush.

  They paused on the pavement outside the café. She caught his arm. Forced him not to start walking away. So he had to remember what he had just said. He had told no-one, certainly not Catherine.

  Fatigue dropped onto him like a coat of nettles falling from the sky, half stifling him. He wanted to lie down on the pavement, cheek flat in a puddle, and drown in sleep. Traffic splashed past. He ordered his legs to begin moving. He pulled Vinny along.

  After some moments Vinny halted their progress. She stood stock still in the middle of the pavement, so that pedestrians behind cannoned into her, had to dart round her, exclaiming and muttering.

  —You need a muse. You haven’t got one at the moment, have you? I can tell. That’s your problem. It’s simple.

  He put his free arm around her and laughed aloud.

  —Vinny, you’re hopeless. What a romantic and oldfashioned idea.

  Green eyes swivelled and regarded him.

  —I love you, Vinny said: I wish I could help you.

  She did not appear to require a reply. She stuck her hands in her pockets and stared at him.

  —I never did stop loving you, she said: all these years. I thought I could handle it. It was just part of my life. And then at your party on Saturday it suddenly all burst up again, like a fountain being switched on.

  Adam felt like a man in a cartoon, clutching his brow in exasperation and trying not to shout. Or else he was the man in that Blake engraving, arm flung up, clenched fist, drowning. Waves of emotion slopping over his head.

  —Don’t be so absurd, he said: you don’t know what you’re saying. I never heard anything so ridiculous.

  He began to march them along the pavement towards Vinny’s bus-stop. She’d refused a lift earlier. He held the umbrella with his right hand, his arm bent up, held in close to his side. Vinny, matching her pace to his, tucked her hand under his elbow. The umbrella arched over them, a grey satiny dome.

  Adam felt he ought to make some gesture of conciliation. Calm her down. She hadn’t changed. She was as unpredictable and volatile as a child. He searched for neutral words. It was like tearing up a rotten draft and beginning a new one.

  —You’re so sweet, he said: what can I say? Thank you.

  They tramped along to the pedestrian crossing, darted across in front of the impatient traffic, gained the pavement opposite. The familiar shopfronts flicked by, panels of doors and windows slick with wet. Here at last was the bus-stop coming up.

  —It’s not a very good idea, that’s all, Adam said: is it? It’s not wise. We’re brother and sister, we’re friends, and that delights me. I think we should keep it that way.

  They stopped walking, entered the canopy of the bus-shelter. It was empty except for them. The street noise receded. They were held in a translucent cocoon, a bubble blown inside brimming wet, glassed in on three sides. Adam thumbed the catch on his umbrella, pulled at the metal bracelet stuck with thin ribs, drew down the dark skirts gleaming with raindrops. He shook out their frilled fullness, bunched up the damp pleats in the fingers of one hand and gripped the handle with the other, began to furl their silky smoothness, twisting the overlapping layers round and round. His right hand sought for the short strip of dangling ribbon, the little button on the end of it that was the catch.

  Vinny was standing too close to him. He could smell her skin and her hair. Vanilla. Oranges. He put his arms around her, one hand still clasping the umbrella, and she put her arms around him. The umbrella, unfastened, loosened itself, flared out like a great poppy, a balloon of grey silk.

  The 43 bus churned up to the kerb, spraying their feet and ankles with muddy water. He released Vinny and kissed her cheek. He searched for the words he hadn’t been able to say twenty-seven years ago.

  —I’m so sorry, Vinny.

  She jumped onto the platform, grasping the metal pole in one hand to pull herself aboard.

  —Ask Catherine who the model was for that painting in your bedroom, she cried: why don’t you? Or is that something else you don’t want to know?

  Without looking back she clumped up the stairs to the top deck. He saw her gauzy grey skirt vanish; her black boots.

  * * *

  Vinny was shaking. She scrambled towards her favourite seat in the front, by the driver’s periscope, just as the bus pulled away. They swerved and jolted, joining the main stream of traffic, and she nearly fell over. She dropped onto her seat, trembling. You couldn’t smoke on buses anymore. She’d made a heroic effort in the café and not smoked, because Adam was trying to give up. At the party he’d leaned away from her cigarette, frowning.

  Now the nicotine withdrawal was really hitting her. Her insides were clamouring for a joint, or at least a cigarette. Above all, for the moment of sharpness and clarity
that inhaling brought. A knife to the brain. Edges to yourself; less of the blurriness that came from talking to others, when you cracked open like eggs and let your wet yellow hearts flop out, break and leak into the whites, pool in the space between you. Once out, runny and transparent, how did you know you’d ever get yourself back in?

  Her face felt thickened to crimson with blushing. What a fool she’d been. Behaving like a schoolgirl with a crush. How could she have been so stupid? No self-control. A middle-aged woman making an absurd spectacle of herself. Pathetic and grotesque. She’d embarrassed him. Disgusted him. She’d never be able to look him in the face again. She had betrayed her sister, as well. He loved Catherine. Of course he did. She ought to stand by Catherine and stick up for her at all times. She should have kept her secret. What could she have been thinking of?

  She knew the answer to that one. Revenge. How horrible she was. What a bitch. What a cow. She wanted to crawl under a stone and die. She curled her fingers into fists, so that her nails attacked her palms.

  Her empty mouth yearned for that slim paper tube of tobacco. Something safe to hold on to, that kept you anchored in the world and less liable to fly off; an umbilical cord; food of a sort; also a barrier between you and the other, a soft wall of smoke you could peer through, sometimes climb over. Hide behind. The bus was tilting along so fast she felt she might fall out of the wide window just in front. She clasped the steel rail with both hands and tried to breathe deeply. It was no good. Tears rose up, warm, spilled over. She invoked that sliver of ice Graham Greene said every writer had at heart, that chip of ice warning her she’d have to stop weeping in five minutes when the bus arrived at her stop. So have a nice cry in the meantime, said the chip of ice. But the ice floes were melting. They’d grind her to death. She’d fallen overboard. She was the monster thrown out of the Ark. The Flood overwhelmed her. She began to cry.