Life Drawing for Beginners (6 page)

“Excuse me,” he said, “but I do not understand—”

“Oh, you understand all right,” the woman told him. “You understand enough to enroll in this
sinful
class. How can you sleep at night?”

“How I sleep?” asked poor Zarek. “Very well, thank you.” Had he somehow offended them by being a sound sleeper?

“Is your conscience not troubled?” the man asked.

“My—”

“Hello there.”

To his enormous relief, Zarek recognized the tall woman who’d enrolled in the life drawing class. Perhaps she would explain.

“Can I ask what you’re protesting about?” she asked the couple.

“You can,” the woman answered grimly. “There’s a class going on here this evening involving a naked person.”

“Really? A naked person?” Behind her purple-framed spectacles her eyes widened. “I didn’t hear anything about that. Some kind of publicity stunt, I suppose.” She turned to Zarek. “We might get our pictures in the paper.”

“Some kind of
filth
, you mean,” the woman retorted—before Zarek, who was now completely lost, could attempt a response. “An
art
class, if you don’t mind, bold as brass in the middle of Carrickbawn, and my husband and I felt we had to show our disgust.”

“Well, good for you,” the tall woman said, edging towards the doorway. “Well done, pity there aren’t more like you.” She addressed Zarek again. “Come on, we’ll be late for our…flower arranging.”

“No—he signed up for the art class,” the older man protested. “We saw him.”

“Actually, there was a mistake,” the woman told him, lowering her voice. “He’s from Poland, very confused, terrible English. He thought he was signing up for flower arranging, poor thing—​well, you can see how he could mix them up. It was all sorted out eventually. And now we must dash, or we’ll be late. Keep up the good work.”

She shepherded the bewildered Zarek briskly through the college entrance. “Phew—let’s hope we don’t have to do that every Tuesday.”

“You not come to life drawing?” he asked her. “You change to other class?”

She smiled. “No, I haven’t changed, I’m still going to life drawing. I just said that to get away. Remember, if you meet those two again, you’re going to flower arranging, okay? It’ll just keep you out of trouble.”

Zarek nodded. It seemed the simplest thing to do.

“You hardly touched your dinner. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, I just thought I’d better not be too full for the Pilates. I’ll have a bit more when I get home. And thanks for looking after Eoin.”

“What looking after? He’s no trouble. You should get out a bit more.” Her mother eyed the bag on Jackie’s shoulder. “What’s that you have?”

“Just a towel,” Jackie lied. “We were told to bring one, for the cool-down.” Amazing, how easily the lies came.

“Bring a dressing gown,” Audrey had said, “that you can slip on and off.”

Jackie thought of slipping off the dressing gown in front of them all and her stomach lurched for the thousandth time. She hoped to God she’d be able to keep down the bit of dinner she’d managed to eat. She’d been jittery all day at work, her anxiety increasing as the evening had drawn nearer.

A mistake, a huge mistake. She wasn’t cut out for this, she didn’t have the nerve for it. But it was much too late to back out now, she’d have to go through with it. She’d endure tonight somehow and tell Audrey she’d have to find someone else for the rest of the classes. She opened the front door and stepped out into the cool evening air.

“You can feel the autumn coming,” her mother said. “Are you sure Dad can’t drive you?”

“No, no—I could do with the walk.”

Imagine meeting Audrey outside the college, imagine her saying something to Jackie’s father that would give the game away. It would be like Santorini all over again.

“Enjoy yourself, love, see you later.”

“See you.”

Enjoy yourself
—if she only knew what her idiot of a daughter had signed up for. As Jackie made her way to Carrickbawn Senior College she marveled, not for the first time, at how life had returned to normal in the Moore household after she’d turned it upside down over six years earlier. It hadn’t seemed possible, in the awful weeks following her revelation, that she’d ever be forgiven.

Her father leaving the room anytime she walked in, hardly able to look at her if they met on the stairs. Her mother’s accusatory, tear-filled rants, wailing that Jackie had disgraced them, that they’d never again be able to hold their heads up.

Jackie’s friends had assured her that given time, they’d come around. “When the baby is born,” they’d said, “things will change, wait and see.” But Jackie hadn’t believed them. Her friends hadn’t a clue, none of them had been in her situation. If anything, the baby would make things worse, would be a constant reminder to her parents of how stupid Jackie had been.

“Your whole life ahead of you,” her mother had sobbed, “anything you wanted to do, all waiting for you. And now this, everything gone, the Leaving Cert useless to you.”

And Jackie had remained silent, knowing that it was all true. She
had
ruined her life, she couldn’t deny it. She’d gone to Santorini with three friends the summer after the Leaving Cert. She’d drunk too much and taken a chance, like so many others, and she was one of the unlucky ones who’d been caught.

She had no idea who Eoin’s father was. She remembered he was English, but that was it. They’d met in a bar and they’d made their way to the beach afterwards. Jackie had woken, headachy and alone on the chilly sand as the sun was coming up. She’d never seen him again. They’d been together for a few drunken hours and they’d made a child, and he’d go through the rest of his life not knowing that one summer he’d fathered a son.

By the time Jackie realized she was pregnant, a fortnight before she was due to start college, her holiday tan had long since faded. She’d confessed to her parents—what else could she do?—and all hell had broken loose.

And now Eoin was six, and his grandparents had doted on him from the day he was born. And twenty-four-year-old Jackie, who’d given up her college place, worked in a boutique that was owned by a friend of her mother’s, and she couldn’t say that she was unhappy.

She rounded the last bend, and the gates of Carrickbawn Senior College loomed ahead of her. She took a deep breath and walked on, willing the next two hours to fly by, telling herself to rise above it and pretend it wasn’t happening.

Audrey turned in the college gates and hurried up the driveway, blotting her damp, rosy face with a tissue. She approached the entrance, panting heavily, hardly registering the older couple who were stowing something in a car boot, their backs to her.

In the lobby she waved distractedly at Vincent as she rushed past his cubicle. Hopefully he’d assume she had a good reason for turning up almost fifteen minutes after the starting time, as indeed she had. A moped that wouldn’t start, despite having just been serviced, surely constituted a good reason.

But Lord, how unprofessional to arrive late to your first-ever evening class, when you were the teacher and naturally expected to be there ahead of everyone. How bad it must look, how they must all be regretting that they’d chosen her class.

She burst into the room, full of flustered apologies: “I’m
so
sorry”—fumbling at the buttons of her jacket as she approached the desk—“my moped refused to start”—her blouse stuck to her back, her armpits
drenched
—“so I had to
race
all the way”—her face on fire—“you must all think I’m just the most careless person—” She flung her jacket on the chair, trying to catch her breath, doing her best to compose herself, forcing a smile as she panted to a halt.

They regarded her silently. Five faces registering varying degrees of concern, no disapproving expression that she could see. At least they’d all waited, at least none of them had walked out when she hadn’t shown up at half past seven.

Audrey patted her hair, attempting to marshal her thoughts—​and as she scanned the room she realized with fresh horror that her model was nowhere to be seen.

Michael ran his hand along the row of photo albums on the bottom shelf of the bookcase until he came to what he wanted. He pulled it out and brought it to his armchair.

For some minutes he sat with the book closed in his lap, staring at the framed photo of his wedding day on the mantelpiece. Ruth wore a white fur stole over her dress—they’d chosen New Year’s Day to get married—and carried a small bouquet of white flowers. She leaned into Michael’s side and gazed up at him—such a little slip of a thing she’d been—and they both looked perfectly happy. If they’d known what lay ahead, how little time they’d have together, what a mess Michael would make of everything after she’d left.

He opened the album and turned the pages slowly. Like all parents, they’d gone mad with the camera for their firstborn. Ethan had been snapped in all manner of poses. Lots of him fast asleep, curled on his side, mouth pursed, clutching Bun-Bun, the little blue rabbit that someone—Michael’s mother?—had given him, and that had gone to bed with him for years.

In others he was sitting on somebody’s lap, or on a rug out the back, his face and hands covered in ice cream, or standing by the clothesline, podgy hands hanging on tight to the pole. Michael remembered, with a fierce stab, Ruth running in from the garden to snatch up the camera, shouting
Quick, he’s standing, he’s staying up!

And there he was later, toddling around by himself, grinning up at the camera in little shorts and a T-shirt with Mickey Mouse on the front, splashing naked in a paddling pool, sitting in front of a birthday cake with two candles.

Michael turned a page and looked at Ethan on a couch, his baby sister in his arms. He would have been three then, or almost. About the same age as the child who’d come into the shop with his mother.

The white-blonde hair was similar—but lots of young children had hair that color. Ethan’s had darkened to a midbrown by the time he was six or seven. The faces were different, the boy in the shop was peaky, with none of Ethan’s chubbiness—but that could be down to how he was being brought up. A steady diet of junk food probably, and precious little fruit or vegetables.

Michael sat back and closed his eyes. What was the point of this? He’d made his choice, he’d sent them away, and chances were he’d never see them again. He shut the album and returned it to the shelf. He switched on the television and watched as someone tried, excruciatingly slowly, to win a million pounds.

“Remember we’re just trying to get the overall shape of the body here,” Audrey said. “Forget about detail—in these short poses we’ll map in the holistic view quickly, so look for the curve of the spine, the angle of the head, the positioning of the legs. And don’t worry about getting it right, let’s just enjoy the form.”

She walked among the tables, keeping up a running commentary of instruction, demonstrating how to produce a rapid sketch, how to use the pencil to gauge proportions, how to relate the various body shapes to one another.

After the first ten minutes she’d picked out Zarek’s natural affinity with his pencil, and James’s rough, brave efforts. She observed Irene’s flamboyant but amateur attempts; Meg’s overreliance on her putty rubber; Fiona’s hopeful, haphazard scribbling.

Along the way she also noted Irene’s cleavage—could that tan be real?—Meg’s silver earrings that were shaped like tiny scissors, the small, dark brown mole on the back of Fiona’s neck, the flecks of white scattered through James’s almost black hair. And as she walked around the room taking everything in, Audrey offered silent, fervent thanks that after the shakiest of starts, her first life drawing class was finally under way.

Once she’d established that her model wasn’t in the room, she’d instructed her band of students to rearrange their six tables so that they formed a horseshoe shape. “After that,” she told them, pulling rolls of masking tape from her bag, “you can take a wooden board from the table at the back and attach a page from your pads to it with this. I’ll be right back.”

She’d hurried from the room, praying that Jackie was in the vicinity—surely she’d have gotten in touch if something had prevented her from coming? But what if she hadn’t bothered, what if she’d simply changed her mind? Surely not—she hadn’t struck Audrey as that kind of person when they’d met.

She might have lost her nerve though, and been too embarrassed to let Audrey know. How could anyone conduct a life drawing class with no model? Audrey wondered wildly if Vincent the caretaker could be persuaded to sit for them.

She pulled her phone from her pocket and jabbed at Jackie’s number. It was answered on the first ring.

“Hello?”

Faint, nervous—but at least she’d answered it. Audrey closed her eyes and crossed her fingers tightly.

“Jackie? It’s Audrey. Where are you?”

“I’m here, I’m in the bathroom, but I can’t—”

“Hang on—I’ll be right there.”

Audrey dashed towards the toilet block, heart in her mouth. She pushed the door open and burst inside—and there was her model, huddled by the bank of sinks in a blue dressing gown, deathly pale, her shoes and socks still on, a rucksack clasped to her chest, an expression of abject fear on her face.

“I can’t do it,” she blurted as soon as Audrey appeared. “I’m really sorry, I thought I could, but I just can’t. I feel sick. I can’t go in there. Please don’t make me. I’m sorry, I know I’m letting you down, but I can’t.”

It was what Audrey had been dreading. Jackie had had too much time to think about the implications of presenting her naked body to a group of strangers. Her initial confidence, which Audrey had bolstered so carefully in the café, had worn off and left her terrified.

Audrey put an arm around her shoulder, searching her mind for the right words, praying for a miracle in the next minute or two. “Jackie, if I had a euro for every model who was nervous before her first time, I’d be a millionaire. What you’re feeling is perfectly understandable, but I know you’re well able—I wouldn’t have taken you on if I didn’t think you could do it. The students are lovely, and like I said, there are only five of them. They’re adults, they’re very professional. You’ll have no bother at all.”