Life: An Exploded Diagram (18 page)

It seemed to her that the thump of her heart might be audible.

Her parents were going out tonight.

She would have time.

Okay.

She went to the door, then glanced back. There was a pack of Three Castles cigarettes on her father’s desk. She hesitated, then went and picked it up and shook it. It sounded sort of half empty. She stuffed it into her skirt pocket.

Clem and Frankie leaned on their elbows, their shoulders touching. Outside the small window, the sky above the horizon was a deep amber. Thin streamers of cloud the same color as their cigarette smoke.

“I’m really sorry. Daddy suddenly announced that he was going to London for a business meeting. I thought, Great. Then Mummy decided that we would go, too, and do some shopping. I tried to get out of it, honestly. I couldn’t call you before we left. You must have been worried sick.”

Below them, Marron snuffled and stamped his feet.

“Yeah, I was. I thought you’d . . . You know.”

She turned her face to his.

“What? Gone off you?”

They kissed, tongue slithering over tongue, cigarettes held away.

“So what did you do? In London.”

“I told you. Shopping.”

“What, for three days? What did you buy?”

She shrugged.

“You know. Clothes and so forth.”

He felt there was something she wasn’t telling him. He didn’t want to know what it was. But he couldn’t keep the sulk from his face. She saw it and plucked the cigarette from his fingers and stubbed it out on the floor, then did the same with her own. She rolled on top of him, pressing down on him, kissing him.

When she had breath enough, she said, “Put your hands lower down. Please.”

A lifetime later she lifted herself off him, tossed her hair aside, and looked at her watch, a small silver-framed square on a black leather strap.

“I don’t want to stop,” she said, “but I have to go now.”

“I thought you said your mum and dad were out.”

“It’s not just them.”

She was kneeling astride him. With the last light behind her, all he could see of her face was the glimmer in her eyes. He took her breasts in his hands.

“Oh, Lordy,” she said.

“Frankie.”

“No. Clem.”

“Please.”

“No. I have to go.”

She stood, stooping under the roof. He thought she was angry.

He said, “What d’you think of this place, then? Will it do?”

She looked over her bare shoulder into the gloom.

“It needs tidying up a bit. But, yes, it’ll do.”

T
HEY FURNISHED THE
loft modestly. An inventory of its contents would be brief: a horse blanket (clean) from the manor’s tack room; a sleeping bag (only slightly less so), last used three years ago on Clem’s one and only (and miserable) school cadet camp; a few candles and a box of matches (sometimes, when dusty rain flurried at them over the naked fields, they found it necessary to close the shutters); a shallow wooden box, found beneath the loft, kept supplied with carrots and apples (to placate Marron when he grew restless); fear (often); delirium (frequently).

They embarked upon their halcyon days. Their brief golden age.

Over breakfast, Frankie would tell her parents that she thought she might take Marron on a nice long hack, then go to the kitchen and ask Cook, sweetly, if she would prepare a packed lunch.

Nicole found it vaguely worrying.

“Don’t you think it strange, this sudden enthusiasm for riding, Gerard?”

Mortimer replied from behind the
Daily Telegraph.

“Is it? She’s always been rather keen, hasn’t she? It’s good for her, anyway — keeps her out of mischief.”

He lowered the newspaper. “Besides, what else would she be doing?”

Nicole pursed her lips and tilted her head: a Gallic gesture Gerard had once found charming, but which now irritated him.

Frankie was careful to vary her route away from the manor, and this might add a mile or more to the ride. No matter; the thought of Clem’s impatience, and the ways he would show it, excited her. She smiled, remembering Maddie:
They get into the most extraordinary states.

“Where’re you been all day, Clem? You weren’t here when I come home for dinner.”

He’d been waiting for the question.

“Homework, Mum.”

“Homework? What homework?”

“Art. We’re doing landscape next term. I’m supposed to do loads of sketches over the holidays.”

Ruth filled the teapot from the electric kettle and looked at him.

“And hev you?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I see ’em?”

Clem shrugged. “If you want to.”

He was almost always at Franklins long before Frankie got there. He felt, though he’d never acknowledged the feeling, that he should be. Because he’d found the place and therefore had a kind of ownership of it. Because it was important that
she
come to
him.
A kind of power. Besides, the waiting excited him. He was becoming addicted to the anticipation of her arrival, the long bodily thrill of expecting her. Then she would lead the horse into the barn and throw herself upon him, having worked herself up into a state, hoping he’d be there.

It was like dreaming and waking into the dream.

Instinct, rather than the need for an alibi, made him bring his sketchbook and his pencils to the barn. Waiting for her, he drew the coarse, complex bark of the pines. The way the trees looked from twenty daring paces into the field. Or the ferns bursting through the walls of the ruined house. The overhanging shadows on the path. Drawing was like putting the lid on a pan coming to the boil. The pictures had a jittery spontaneity and quickness that he’d never previously found within himself.

Ruth said, “Where’s this, then?”

“Them trees? Out Swafield way.”

“I like this one, that ole building. Where’s that?”

Clem tried to look ashamed of himself.

“Nowhere. I made that up. Jiffy’ll never know.”

There were other drawings, hidden drawings, that he would slit his own throat rather than show her.

On Saturdays he’d tell Ruth that he was going to the matinee at the Regal and afterward he was going to muck about with Goz. On his way home, fizzing from his day with Frankie, he’d stop at a phone box and call Goz, who’d tell him what to say. There’d been a cartoon, an episode of
Flash Gordon,
another cartoon, then the main feature: a Western starring Alan Ladd. Goz always went to the matinee. It was the nearest he got to religious observance. The petty vendettas in the stalls, the ostentatious flirting behind him, the lobbing of chewed sweets out of the dark, never distracted him. His recall of films was perfect.

Clem got bored, listening to the recitation.

“Orright, comrade. Got that. Ta.”

He and Frankie discovered each other because now they could spare the time to talk. They found each other equally astonishing, their ways of life equally unimaginable, exotic. School was common ground, though; the horrors of Newgate and Saint Ethelburger’s were interchangeable. They worked themselves into ecstasies of giggling, fantasizing about the sexual predilections of nuns and schoolmasters.

“You’re clever, though, Clem. I could never do A levels.”

“’Course you could.”

“No, honestly. What would be the point, anyway?”

This troubled him. It had never occurred to him to question the purpose of education. It was, obviously, a means of escape. A way into a different life. He chewed on one of Frankie’s sandwiches while it dawned on him that she probably wasn’t looking for, didn’t need, a flight from whom and what she was.

“What’s in this?” he asked her.

“Smoked salmon. Do you like it?”

“It’s orright.”

She’d filched a flagon of cider from the pantry on her way out to the stables. They’d drunk half of it. They were both a little high. She took another swig.

“What’ll you do after art school? Will you starve in a garret, painting things too brilliant for anyone to appreciate until after you’re dead?”

He laughed, although he didn’t know what a
garret
was.

“Shouldn’t think so.”

She looked at him very seriously, resting her head on her hand.

“We’ll run away,” she said. “We’ll live in Paris. It’ll be okay because I speak French, but we’ll be terribly poor and have to live on bread and wine and tangerines. I’ll be your model. You’ll paint me over and over again. Then a rich gallery owner will discover you, and you’ll be fabulously successful and famous.”

(Frankie had once read a slightly racy novel in which these things happened. She left out the last bit, when the model ran off with the rich man, leaving the artist to paint her, obsessively, from memory, until he died of heartbreak.)

“Isn’t that a simply gorgeous idea? Let’s do it, Clem.”

“Yeah. Okay, that’s what we’ll do.”

“I mean it. Promise me that’s what we’ll do.”

“Frankie . . .”

“Apart from anything else, it means you could spend all day looking at me in the nude. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

His throat tightened. They’d reached the underwear stage of their courtship. Feeling each other in the gloom was one thing, though. Gazing frankly at each other was another. They’d tacitly avoided it. He’d turn away from her to pull his jeans up while she rebuttoned her blouse.

“I want you to draw me,” she said now.

“No.”

“Why not?”

He turned away from her. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

He shrugged. The way the muscles worked in his narrow back delighted her.

“I want you to. Clem.
Please.
”

“I ent . . . I’m not much good at that sort of thing.”

She put her arm around him and pressed the side of her face against his skin, but he remained tense, withdrawn from her.

“Clem? Clem, what?”

“You’re too beautiful. I draw you all the time, but it never really look, looks, like you. I’m not good enough.”

“Yes, you are. It’s because you’ve been doing it from memory.”

It had been a silly dare, a whim, but now she found herself wanting, needing, him to do it. To gaze at her, to study her.

And in the end he yielded, as she’d known he would.

He crawled over to his bag and took out the cartridge-paper pad, the drawing board, the old slide-top wooden pencil box. When he turned back to her, the breath snagged in his gullet. She had removed her brassiere and was lying on the sleeping bag in what she imagined to be an artistic pose. On her side, her head supported on her right hand, her legs drawn slightly up, the left hand resting on her thigh.

“Like this?”

He could only nod.

He sat with his back against the wall, the bricks cool and coarse against his skin, and propped the drawing board against his knees.

His first lines were weak, uncertain. How could they not be? His hand and breathing were unsteady, and he could only bear to look at her in quick, furtive glances.

He erased the effort.

“I can’t do it.”

“Oh, Clem.
Please
.” She drew the word out childishly. “You can’t give up already. Try again.”

He stared down at the paper.

She said, “It’s because you’re not looking at me.”

“’Course I am.”

“No, you’re not. Not properly.”

So he raised his head. His imagination was so hectic with goatish schoolboy lust that he could not see her. Her seriousness, her concentrated stillness, both aroused and frightened him. Eventually, it was only the fear of disappointing her that forced him to see her as what she was, rather than as something he urgently wanted.

In the strong low light from the little window, she was an almost abstract arrangement of pallor and shade. One half of her hair shone above the pale descending curve of her arm. A bright cheekbone, one bright eye. An unutterably beautiful track of light that was her left shoulder, arm, thigh. Her breasts, two soft, almost luminous, crescents.

“
Draw the shadows,
” Jiffy always said. “
Start from the dark and work inward.
” Clem found a 4B pencil and, using it at an angle to the paper, blocked in the darknesses of Frankie’s body, smudging and shaping the lines with his forefinger, cleaning their edges with the eraser. She emerged, ghostly at first, then solidified. Every time he looked up, the light had reduced her. He worked faster, brightening her with chalk.

“My arm’s going to sleep,” Frankie said, not moving her head.

“Hang on. Nearly finished.”

He bluffed the folds of the sleeping bag and leaned back from the drawing, slumping against the brickwork.

No; it hadn’t worked. It was weak. It contained nothing of what he really felt about her.

He scrabbled in the pencil box for the fat 6B pencil and used it to obliterate the tentative lines he’d used to suggest the background. Working quickly, he used his fingertips to press the graphite into the surface of the paper, forming dark clouds that became intensely black where they met the luster of her body. He did the same with the foreground, casting heavy shadows over the nervous cross-hatching meant to suggest straw. He deepened the shading of her lower leg, belly, and left breast.

Yes; he had her now. Or something like her. The old sleeping bag was like an opening in a night sky. She floated in it, burnished by moonlight, not daylight. Dressed in shadows, she seemed utterly naked, confident, expectant.

He had drawn his dream of a night with her.

“Okay,” he said, “you can move now. If you like.”

She sat up, cross-legged, tossed her hair back, massaged her right arm with her left hand. She saw his gaze shift to her bosom. It was a different kind of looking now. She shivered, pretending it was because she was cold, and pulled the sleeping bag around her.

“Well? Are you going to show me or not, Picasso?”

He set the pad down in front of her and rummaged in the pockets of his discarded jeans for the cigarettes and matches. He lit up a Woodbine and went to stare out of the window, not willing to watch her face.

“Gosh.”

He waited.

“It’s nothing like your other drawings. It’s sort of . . . spooky.”

“I told you I wasn’t any good at —”

“Shut up, you idiot. It’s absolutely fabulous. I had no idea.”

“You don’t hev to be nice about it. It don’t even look like you.”

“It doesn’t have to look like me. It
is
me. It’s beautiful, actually.”

She said it so coolly, so matter-of-factly, that he could not believe her, although he desperately wanted to. He heard her move, then felt the naked press of her body and the tickle of her hair against his bare back, her arms coming around him. He gasped smokily.

“It
is
beautiful, my own boy genius,” she said.

He tried to turn to face her, but she clasped her fingers together on his chest and held him still.

“Don’t move yet,” she whispered.

She didn’t want him to see that her eyes were wet.

He had captured her. He had taken from her the safety of believing that he was less than her. That penultimate barrier was down.

She said, “Can I keep it?”

Later, when she undressed for her bath, she saw the prints and smears his blackened fingers had left upon her.