Life Drawing for Beginners Read online

  “I have a horrible day,” Pilar said, dropping her bag to the floor and yanking off her hat. “I kill that woman if I work for her one more week.” She unzipped her jacket, glaring at Zarek. “You know what she say me today? She say I eat too much biscuits. Plenty money, but she count biscuits—pah!”

  She stalked towards the kitchen, leaving a faint tang of disinfectant in her wake, and Zarek heard her speaking to Anton in precisely the same annoyed tone.

  He closed the front door quietly behind him and bounded happily down the stairs, looking forward to two hours of no dramas, no complaints.

  —————

  The bedroom door opened and Martin walked in. “She’s asleep.”

  Irene slipped a chunky silver bangle over her hand. “Good.” She changed her mind and took the bangle off again—it might get in the way when she was drawing. “Did you start the dishwasher?”

  He opened the top drawer of his bureau and began rummaging through it. “I did.”

  He didn’t look forty-eight. He had the muscle tone of a man years younger. Irene appreciated how he filled his T-shirt, how hard and firm his body was under that grey marl cotton. She loved the way he moved, the way he strode across a room, any room, as if he owned it.

  She wondered again if he was having an affair—and again, she didn’t ask.

  “You’ll be glad to get the car back,” he said, still riffling through files.

  “Sure will,” Irene said, taking a thin gold chain from her jewelry box and wrapping it around her wrist.

  “When did they say?”

  “Thursday, but I told them I needed it for work. I’ll give them a ring in the morning.”

  “You’re an awful liar,” he said in the same neutral tone of voice.

  Irene shrugged and reached for her perfume. “No harm done—​​and the guy will get a fine fat tip if he has it ready for tomorrow.”

  She touched the stopper behind her ears and on her wrists, conscious of his presence behind her. She dipped the stopper back into the bottle and dotted perfume on her cleavage. She stood and took her lavender scarf from the bed and draped it around her neck.

  “Have fun,” Martin said, pulling out a folder and bending over it.

  “You know me.” She rested a palm briefly on his back as she passed. Aching to press against him, to feel his solid bulk all along the length of her, to breathe in his spicy smell. “See you.”

  In the hall she took his car keys from their hook and opened the front door. Now that the first night of life drawing had arrived, she was half regretting her impulse to sign up. Did she really want to stare at another woman’s body for two hours? Should she have gone for photography on Wednesdays, or pottery on Thursdays?

  The teacher was a mess, with that mop of curly hair and horrendous fashion sense—imagine putting a patterned skirt over those hips. Irene could only hope that she was better at teaching art than dressing herself. If the opportunity arose she might mention the gym, just throw it out to the group, make sure the teacher overheard. She’d be a real challenge, if Irene took her on.

  As she drove towards the college she thought she wouldn’t mind being a model for a life drawing class. She’d never been shy about showing off what she had, and what she had was in pretty good nick, thanks to her workouts. Breasts that still pointed in the right direction, a behind that would give Beyoncé a run for her money, long lean thighs. Her Brazilian wax might cause a bit of a scandal, though. The view might be a little too revealing.

  She thought about the mechanic who was repairing the car. She’d know when she collected it, she’d know by the way he talked to her if anything was going to happen. She wouldn’t push herself on him, she’d never do that. But she had a feeling he wouldn’t need any encouragement.

  Not that she wanted him particularly, not that she wanted any of them. But Martin had put himself beyond her reach, and the emptiness that had caused in her had to be filled. She had to try and fill it, try to put something in its place, or she’d go demented.

  She drove through the college gates and pulled into a parking space. She locked Martin’s car and strode towards the entrance, her three-inch heels clacking loudly on the paving stones. She passed an elderly couple holding placards and she smiled brightly at the woman, who glared back at her.

  —————

  As he approached the massive doors that led into the Senior College, Zarek observed a man and woman pacing back and forth in front of the building, each holding a notice of some kind. Perhaps they were advertising the evening classes, maybe they were some sort of Irish welcome.

  But as he got closer he changed his mind. Neither of them was smiling or looking at all welcoming. On the contrary, the woman was regarding Zarek with what appeared to be surprising hostility.

  “You’re one of them,” she said as he drew level with her. “I saw you. Didn’t you see him?” she demanded, turning to her companion.

  The man nodded grimly. “Oh yes, he was there, he was filling in the form. I hope you’re thoroughly ashamed, young man. It’s not too late to change your mind.”

  Zarek was puzzled. They seemed angry with him, but he had no idea why. Had they met before? They didn’t look at all familiar. He scanned the notices they held, thinking they might offer some explanation.

  NO FILTH IN CARRICKBAWN, he read on one, and KEEP OUR TOWN DECENT on the other. Both signs were handwritten with a black marker on squares of white card, and attached to their wooden poles—sections of a broom handle?—with green insulation tape, and their messages completely escaped Zarek.

  “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.