Life Class Read Free

slackened his pace. No, but this was stupid, he had to see it through. He’d call a cab, select the most respectable-looking driver he could find and pay for the girl to be transported back to her own people. If she’d go. Suddenly the simple plan bristled with problems. She wouldn’t be keen for her parents or her employer to see her in this state. And could he trust the driver not to take the money and tip her out of the cab as soon as they turned the corner? He’d have to go with her, that’s all, but then, would she get into a cab with a strange man? He’d face that problem later.
    Decided now, he quickened his pace, but just then a group of nursemaids pushing perambulators came bowling along towards him, taking up the full width of the path. By the time he’d made up the lost ground the girl had turned through the gate. Panting as he reached the spot, he looked up and down the road, but the pavements were crowded and, among the hundreds of hurrying people, her unsteady gait was no longer so conspicuous. And then he saw her, far away now, on the other side of the road, but there was no pause in the traffic to let him cross. He stood on tiptoe, seeing the black straw hat with its little bunch of cloth violetsbobbing along, until eventually it was lost to sight in the milling crowds.
    He’d left all his things at the Slade so he had to go back there. Jumping on a bus, he found a seat on the top deck and gazed out over the heads of the crowds. For the first few minutes he kept on searching for the girl, though he knew he wouldn’t see her.
    The exhilaration had gone now. He was back with his own problems. Should he admit defeat and leave the Slade? Was he wasting Nan’s legacy?
    – ’ Course you bloody are. Art! It’s not for people like us, such as that.
    What ‘people like us’ did – or, more frequently, didn’t do – had been a favourite topic of hers, the pincers used to nip off any green shoot of hope and ambition one or other of her children might have been cherishing. They’d learned not to, fast enough. She hadn’t applied it to herself though, at least not towards the end of her long life. At eighty, she’d bought herself a motor car. The only motor car previously seen in their streets belonged to the local doctor. Every Friday afternoon and all day Saturday she’d been driven round to collect her rents, sitting up on the back seat, ramrod straight (though she was a martyr to her back), dismounting now and then to bang on the doors of one ramshackle house after another, wresting coppers from reluctant hands. She must have been the most hated woman in the city.
    – Aye, mebbe. But it put the clothes on your back, didn’t it? And paid for you to go to that posh school.
    He got off near Russell Square and walked the rest of the way. Students were streaming away from the Slade as he approached, but he kept his head down, not wanting to speak to anybody. He hadn’t reached a decision, though if anything all that pacing round the park had strengthened his feeling that he ought to leave as soon as possible.
    The Antiques Room did nothing to change his mind. Plaster casts of Classical and Renaissance sculpture stood in a line along one wall.
    – Cartload of fellers showing their whatsits.
    He’d spent whole mornings copying them, whole days when he first started, except for an hour at the end of the afternoon session when they were allowed to troop down the corridor to join the life class. On benches at the far end were smaller pieces: decapitated heads, limbless torsos, amputated arms and legs. Like an abattoir without the blood.
    Had all his time in this room been wasted?
    No time to be asking that question now. He picked up his bag and was about to leave when he heard a noise and turned to find Elinor Brooke standing by the open door.
    ‘I thought I heard somebody,’ she said.
    She came towards him until she was close enough to touch. A stir of desire, almost indistinguishable from