The Art School Dance Read Free

me.
     
     

Chapter Two
     
    ‘You’re
not going out in that thing, are you?’ my mother asked, when she
saw that I was wearing my father’s old army greatcoat. It was the
only thing I'd kept of his after his death, a few sizes too big for
me but just the right thing, distinctive, with a collar I could
hide behind and so long it almost reached down to my feet. When I
saw the tearful gleam in my mother’s eye I wasn't sure if it was
because of the memories the coat occasioned or because of the extra
shame I was going to cause her by dressing like a tramp.
    ‘ It’s
cold out tonight,’ I told her.
    ‘ So?
You’ve got a perfectly good coat in the wardrobe.’
    She meant the
smart black Marks and Sparks number from the days when I dressed
stylishly, a thing I wouldn’t be seen dead in once I became an art
student. Becoming an art student had changed me, had helped me to
realise that it was manners that made a person, not clothes; as an
artist I was learning to look beyond the superficial, to look more
deeply rather than accept things at face value.
    There was a
time not too long ago when my mother would have argued, insisted,
refused to let me out dressed so scruffily, but that was before my
father died. Once we had buried him she seemed to tire quickly, she
took to spending long spells in an armchair where previously she
had been on the go all the time; she and Gran had come to look more
like sisters than mother and daughter. To let her know that I
wasn't deliberately trying to upset her I gave her a peck on the
cheek, tell her I wouldn’t be late, behaved like a loving daughter
was expected to behave. As I left the house, though, I wasn't sure
quite how I felt towards my mother; perhaps it was because of her
weary defeated attitude, which encouraged pity rather than love, or
perhaps it was something more complicated. I was selfish, I knew
that, selfish enough that any love for others should be affected by
it; I never thought enough about other people, but then I believed
that an artist had to be selfish, that an artist had to think about
their work to the detriment of everything else. Maybe I was wrong,
certainly there were people who would insist that I was, but
whether right or wrong I didn’t think that I should regret being
true to my beliefs.
    Once on the
street, away from the gloom of the house, I began to feel cocky
again, a burden seemed to lift from me and there was that jaunty
spring in my step that I enjoyed, the smug smile on my face that it
brought. I turned into the close where Stephen lived, a sort of
courtyard with a small square of grass in the centre and
maisonettes facing in on three of the four sides, stood beneath a
lamp-post and waited, since Stephen’s folks weren’t too fond of me
and I never went into the house when they were home. This was all
because of what I was and the way I looked, of course. What else
could be expected of people in a place like Sleepers Hill? It was
ridiculous, but only a year or two earlier I had been their
blue-eyed girl, an intelligent and respectable young girl who was
just right for their son, future mating material, mother to their
grandchildren. Then, when I became an art student, they started to
regard me as if I was a cockroach scuttling across their precious
snow-white hearth rug. If they met me on the street they pretended
not to know me.
    After a while
an upstairs curtain twitched, Stephen checking to see that I had
arrived, there was something which might have been a wave or a
gesture to stay under cover, and a minute or two later he came
striding out to meet me, his leather-soled shoes echoing around the
close, gave me a big kiss on the mouth and then hugged me to him as
we walked along.
    ‘ Did you
have a good day?’ I asked him, feeling a tickle in my nose as I
caught the scent of his aftershave..
    ‘ Bloody,’ he said, not cursing, for he never had since he
left school, since he started work at the council offices, and he
disapproved if I ever