An Enormous Yes (5 page)

‘What do you do as your job?’ she asked Fiona, the blonde and bosomy woman on her left, once the conversation had moved away from beauty salons.

‘I’m a headhunter, like Amy, only I specialize in financial services rather
than in marketing and retail. I see my role as a matchmaker – trying to pair the client with his ideal, perfect candidate.’

Maria disliked the word ‘headhunter’, with its overtones of cannibals, but her daughter used it all the time. She glanced anxiously at Amy, knowing how dejected she was about this morning’s phone call. Apparently, the man who’d rung had been her lead candidate for the post of marketing director of some prestigious firm but, just this weekend, he had decided against the job and so was pulling out of tomorrow’s meeting with the CEO. Which meant that Amy’s months of hard, painstaking work and
delicate
negotiations had been a total waste of time and, the minute this lunch was over, she would have to sort out the mess.

Aware her mind was wandering, Maria resumed her small talk with Fiona. ‘So I suppose you’re as busy as Amy?’

‘Absolutely. High pressure goes with the job.’

‘And have you also worked in Dubai?’

‘Sadly, no. They say it’s the shopping capital of the world and I’m an incurable shopaholic!’

Was she a prig or, worse, a killjoy, Maria wondered, in that she regarded shopping in the same light as manicures? Hanna’s influence again, of course. Her mother considered it wasteful to buy more clothes or household wares when the old ones were still serviceable. Luckily for Hanna, though, she had never had to mix in so fashionable a milieu. Compared with these sophisticates, she herself felt overweight, under-dressed, homespun and decidedly ancient. The irony was that, when caring for her mother,
she
had been the ‘young’ and trendy one.

As if for comfort, she forked in more potatoes – Waitrose again,
presumably
, since they had been lavishly cooked with onions and cream – then took a swig of her Sauvignon Blanc, savouring its bouquet. It was an
unaccustomed
treat for her to eat and drink so well and, indeed, to eat and drink in company, and as for the voguish dining-room, it was like something from the Design Museum, with its extensive black-glass table and high-backed, grey-steel chairs. Even the vase of roses – exotic beauties in the subtlest shade of pink – looked as if they’d been hothoused in Kew Gardens.

‘No, we thought we’d try the Maldives this year. We did consider Peru, but …’

The talk was now of holidays, although, distracted by her surroundings, she had missed the details of who was going where.

‘No holiday for us, alas.’ Chloe gave a sigh. ‘I’m already as big as a house, so I wouldn’t be seen dead in a swimsuit. You’re lucky, Amy. You hardly show at all.’

‘You’re meant to flaunt your bulge these days,’ Caroline observed, pausing with a forkful of chicken halfway to her mouth. ‘Even wear a bikini at nine months!’

‘Oh, that’s just gross.’ Chloe shuddered.

‘So when are your babies due?’ Maria enquired, feeling guilty for not having asked before.

‘Well, officially, it’s May 5th, though they’ll probably be delivered early. But, however gruesome the labour is, I honestly can’t wait.’ She patted her protuberant stomach with a grimace. ‘What I’ll be like in another three months doesn’t bear thinking about.’

‘Don’t they usually do a Caesarean for twins?’ Maria asked.

‘Yes, that’s the norm, but you can opt for vaginal delivery if the babies are in the right position and there aren’t any complications and, frankly, I’d prefer that to having an ugly scar.’

‘Is a scar any worse,’ Caroline demanded, ‘than being left saggy and incontinent, which you risk with a normal birth?’

Alexander screwed up his face in revulsion. ‘Look, we’re meant to be eating, if you
don’t
mind! And, anyway, all this pregnancy-talk is really pissing me off. I hope you lot realize that, as little as a year ago, none of us was even thinking about procreation. Yet now three of our number have fallen for the myth that life’s not complete without an adorable little sprog – or three.’

‘It’s not a myth. Speak for yourself!’

‘I am –
and
for Deborah, too. Neither of us have the slightest desire to clutter up our lives with dirty nappies, screaming infants and – least of all – sky-high university fees just as we’re hoping to retire.’

‘Infants don’t have to scream,’ Chloe retorted, tartly. ‘Nicholas and I are studying Gabriella Bruno’s book and—’

‘Who’s she?’ asked Deborah.

‘The latest parenting guru. If you follow her methods, you can train a baby to sleep through the night when it’s only a few weeks old.’

Maria tried to keep a straight face. Gabriella Bruno had clearly never met a baby as restless and super-alert as Amy. In any case, ‘training’ made babies sound like dogs.

‘She’s called the Queen of Routine,’ Nicholas chipped in. ‘And she insists on a super-strict timetable. It pays off, though, she claims, because you don’t hear a squeak from your baby, once it’s been broken in, so to speak.’

Maria winced as the terminology changed from dogs to horses. Poor Nicholas and Chloe, she thought, picturing their hungry, self-willed twins blithely ignoring any guru’s strict routine. Thank God
she
would be in
charge when it came to Amy’s baby and could feed it on demand and give it nice, old-fashioned cuddles in the middle of the night, if it so desired. None of those present actually had children yet, so the reality might come as something of a shock. Chloe and Nicholas’s place was as unscathed as Amy and Hugo’s – in fact, it put her in mind of a show-house – and she feared its serene perfection was unlikely to withstand the chaos of the new arrivals.

‘Another thing,’ Chloe added, ‘is that, according to Gabriella, once your children are older, you need only spend fifteen minutes a day with them, so long as it’s quality time and you switch off your mobile and don’t do emails and stuff.’

Maria all but expostulated. A mere dog or cat required more than fifteen minutes’ ‘quality time’. And even if the children went
en famille
to a
day-spa
, presumably they and their parents would all be in separate cubicles, each with a different beautician.

‘Spare me the details,’ Alexander yawned. ‘I still stick by my belief that Deborah and I have chosen the better path.’

‘Absolutely,’ Deborah echoed, giving her husband a maddeningly complicit smile. ‘I mean, if you’re supposed to learn from your mistakes, why do some parents have more than one child? Take our friends, Nigel and Fay. Fay gave birth to this horrific little creature who shrieked the place down and more or less destroyed the house. And, would you believe, far from learning their lesson, they went ahead and had a second son, equally delinquent.’

‘Never mind Nigel and Fay.’ Alexander made a sweeping gesture, all but overturning his wine glass. ‘It’s
you
poor sods I’m worried about. When you’re haggard and near bankrupt – and about to be landed with
grand-kids
, even more expensive and unruly than your own – Debs and I will be going on world cruises, or relaxing by the pool of our luxury villa in Mustique.’

And
, thought Maria, taking an instant dislike to this smugly arrogant banker and his unsympathetic wife, you won’t have the faintest notion of just how much you’ve missed.

‘M
EET
M
ARIA,’ THE
tutor said, steering her towards the group of men and women, all standing by the window, chattering and laughing. ‘She’s new – and new to London, so be sure you make her welcome.’

Everyone began telling her their names, half of which she missed, as they melded in a jumbled blur. At least the class seemed friendly, though – people clustering around her and asking her about herself. And the studio was the perfect setting: a bright, high-ceilinged room; all the available wall-space hung with paintings in a brilliant edgy style.

‘Is this all
your
work?’ she asked the tutor, once the general conversation had died down.

‘No, none of it,’ he laughed. ‘This isn’t even my studio. Mine’s a bit on the small side, so a fellow artist lends me his, just for these Friday classes.’

She was still surprised by how different he was from the persona his name suggested. Felix Frances Fullerton had led her to imagine someone distinctive, or maybe eccentric; not this average sort of chap, of middling build and height, conventionally dressed in grey trousers and blue shirt. The only things that marked him out as an artist were the length of his hair – grey, untidy hair, falling onto the collar of his shirt – and the paint-stains on his battered leather boots.

‘Right, we ought to make a start,’ he said, raising his voice above the chatter, ‘so could you all settle down, please. Maria, I suggest you sit in this armchair, then if you need any instruction, I can perch on the arm and talk to you, without disturbing the others.’

‘If you need any instruction …’ She needed almost fifty years’ worth! Perhaps it was bumptious to have come at all, when she had done
practically
no life drawing since way back in the sixties. But she had acted on a whim; grabbed the phone, two days ago, and rung her old art school, to enlist their help in finding a class, driven simply by a sense of being aimless and expendable. She had no wish to fill her days attending further lunches
or functions with Amy and Hugo’s stylish circle – she would only feel distinctly spare, not to mention ancient. Despite the restrictions of her previous role as carer, it had given her a definitive function and made her central to her mother’s life, whereas at Amy’s she was simply marking time. She couldn’t even do the housework, because they already had a cleaner – one she’d met this morning: an elderly Indonesian, spindle-thin and barely five feet tall. In fact, a Friday class was perfect, because it allowed her to escape Sumiah, who came on Fridays and whose fragile build and air of cowed submission were bound to be a source of guilt.

‘Janina, are you ready?’ Felix called.

‘Yes, ’course.’ The model removed her silky robe, to reveal a full,
curvaceous
figure.

‘I’d like you to begin with a few short three-minute poses, OK?’

‘OK.’ Janina took up a position in the centre of the room, one small, blunt-fingered hand supporting her pendulous breasts, the other resting on her neck.

Maria’s chair was so placed that she could see the woman full-on. Nervously, she picked up a pencil, wondering if she would remember how to draw at all. Yet, to her great surprise, the lines began to flow with such freedom and fluidity, it was as if a dam had burst and all her pent-up longing to express herself was now pouring onto the paper. Instead of the former buzz of conversation, there was now reverential silence in the room; the only sounds the whisper of pencils on paper, the purr of an occasional rubber, and a sudden rasping noise as the man beside her sharpened his pencil with a Stanley knife.

Felix was also drawing, standing in front of the model and so absorbed in the task he seemed to have forgotten about her instruction, or that of anyone else. Not that she minded in the least. She was making up for those deeply regretted ‘lost’ decades, and all that mattered was to continue at her present white-hot pace.

‘One minute left,’ Felix announced, and her pencil moved still faster, eager to make the most of that one remaining minute.

‘Thirty seconds left.’

Hardly had the last second elapsed when Janina took up a new pose. Maria was now presented with her back view: the shoulders squarish, solid; the back itself broad and well upholstered, with an interesting roll of flesh above the waist. Right from the start, she had felt an instant response to this woman’s ample body, its generous proportions and air of relaxed abandon. Her pencil swept down the page as she sketched the mane of near-black hair tumbling over the shoulders, the exaggerated arch of the
back and voluminous curve of the buttocks, the chunky thighs and heavily muscled legs.

‘Thirty seconds left.’

She almost voiced an objection when, once the thirty seconds was up, the model relaxed a moment before adopting the next pose. She had been trying to capture the exact way the left leg was crooked, and now Janina had straightened it.

‘Can we have a longer pose next?’ a tall, willowy woman asked – a plea Maria echoed silently.

Felix nodded. ‘Certainly, if that’s OK with everyone. How about you, Janina? Are you happy with, say, twenty minutes?’

‘Fine.’ The model went to sit on the edge of a straight-backed chair, her legs splayed wide, her fingers caressing her squat, brown nipples, as if inviting all eyes to study them.

Maria envied the way she flaunted her body with such a lack of
inhibition
. This brazen pose displayed her tangled mass of pubic hair and even the lips of her vagina.
She
had been taught, as a convent girl, never to sit with her legs apart, and also warned that bodies were perilous, so the less known about them the better. Even in her twenties, she had been unaware that she possessed such things as labia, until Silas discovered them for her.

Well, if nothing else, her pencil-strokes were becoming increasingly daring, as she endeavoured to catch the nature of that unbiddable pubic hair, which grew even down the tops of Janina’s thighs, as if refusing to be confined. Her concentration was so absolute, she didn’t notice Felix glide across the room and, when he stopped beside her chair, she started in surprise.

‘That’s really expressive drawing,’ he whispered, seating himself on the chair-arm and peering over her shoulder at her work. ‘Honestly, I’m impressed. All it lacks is a certain degree of technical skill. You need to work out how the legs relate to the thighs, the thighs to the stomach and the stomach to the chest.’

His soft, intimate tone reminded her of the confessional. Despite the proximity of the others, the two of them seemed to be in their own private space; his hip nudging against her upper arm; his voice murmuring in her ear; his eyes meeting hers a moment.

‘A grasp of anatomy is essential for an artist,’ he added, in the same hushed tone. ‘Stubbs had whole dead horses hung up in his studio, so he could study their basic structure, and Leonardo da Vinci was always dissecting cadavers.’ He broke off with a smile. ‘I don’t expect you to go as far as that! And, anyway, don’t worry too much at this stage. You’ll find, with more practice, it will just come naturally.’

She was distracted by his hand, gesturing to her work: the strong but stubby fingers, the tiny scar on the wrist, the hairs on the back of the thumb.

‘What you also need to consider,’ he continued, seemingly oblivious of her scrutiny, ‘is the model’s relationship to the chair. The chair has an angle, and
she
has an angle, so try to get a sense of exactly how she’s sitting. But, technicalities apart, what I really like is the freedom of your drawing. It has this huge exuberance, almost an anarchic quality. But I reckon your
sketchbook’s
too small to do justice to the boldness of your style. Wait a sec – I’ll fetch you a board and larger paper.’

He returned in less than a minute; several sheets of paper clipped firmly to a board. ‘No, keep it upright,’ he advised, ‘not balanced on your lap. And I suggest you draw standing up. You may find that still more freeing.’

Although embarrassed to be singled out in this fashion, she was so elated by his praises, she wouldn’t have minded if he had asked her to stand on her head. Besides, the others were so lost in the process of drawing they were blind to everything except the model and their sketchbooks, their gaze continually flicking from one to the other and back again.

She, too, must resume her former focus – not difficult, in fact, since her long years of prayer had taught her a basic discipline, as well as the ability to fix her mind on one all-important figure. Indeed, the fervour and the sense of rapt attention, so apparent in the room, did have certain
similarities
to intense religious devotion. She made a silent vow: to be as observant in this new artistic practice as in her old religious one.

‘So where were you at art school?’ Elizabeth enquired.

Maria took her time in answering. Elizabeth herself had been to the Royal College, so she’d been informed, and Helen to the Slade – both highly distinguished establishments. The Cass was hardly in the same league, despite its full, aristocratic name: the
Sir
John Cass School of Art. And, during her time there, it had been in a state of some upheaval, evolving from a charitable foundation to becoming part of the City of London Polytechnic – not that she would mention the word polytechnic in this exalted company.

‘Well, I was a bit clueless, to be honest,’ she mumbled, finally. ‘You see, I’d lived my whole life in the depths of the country and never met any artists, so I didn’t really know where to go, or even what courses to study.’

She was glad when Elizabeth changed the subject, being reluctant to dwell on that period of her life, when she had felt daunted by her tutors (who were sometimes brusque and frightening), and by those students with
exotic names – Aida, Scarlet, Roderigues, Ché – and confidence to match. And, apart from the other frustrations, she seemed always to be broke, despite having worked for four years in Northumberland, straight after leaving school, and saved all she could for the course. But, when she’d
eventually
made it to the capital, everything cost far more than she’d imagined, including the rent on a small, squalid bedsit in Whitechapel. As for Silas, he hadn’t appeared on the scene until she’d almost completed her foundation year and was about to move to another – even less prestigious – school, since the Cass offered no further courses in Fine Art. But at least he had solved one problem by inviting her to share his flat, despite the fact it wasn’t strictly ‘his’. The rest was history – or perhaps the
end
of her history would be nearer to the mark.

‘More wine?’ Felix asked, doing the rounds with the bottle.

Elizabeth shook her head. ‘No, I’d better not. One glass is enough at lunchtime.’

‘Who says?’ he laughed. ‘One glass is
never
enough! How about you, Maria?’

‘Yes, please.’ She intended to get her fill of this blissful Friday lunchtime. However inexperienced she might be, compared with all the rest, she did, in fact, feel surprisingly at home, surrounded as she was by laid-back, congenial people, rather than high-powered business types. There wasn’t a suit to be seen. Helen was wearing mustard-coloured leggings and a blue embroidered waistcoat; Barry sported purple corduroy trousers, while Robert’s tawny hair clashed deliciously with his crimson shirt. No one was ultra-stylish, ultra-gorgeous, or even particularly young, so she could hold her own, she felt. Even Felix must be sixtyish, although the lively way he moved and spoke made him seem much younger.

Robert passed her a plate of oatcakes; some spread with hummus, others with cream cheese. ‘So will you be coming back next week?’ he asked.

She reflected for a moment. This class would give her a much-needed sense of purpose until the baby was born and, if she practised regularly, would fill the long and lonely days. ‘Yes,’ she said, with a sudden surge of contentment, ‘most definitely I will.’

On the way back to the tube, she began thinking about her grandchild, whom she intended to teach to draw, as soon as it was old enough to hold a crayon, and also take to the London galleries, in its pushchair. In fact, she could start going to them herself, to study the great masters’ nudes and try to pick up some basic techniques.

All at once, she recalled Hanna’s utter horror when she’d first mentioned her weekly life class, back in 1965. Her mother shared the Church’s view of nakedness, as shameful, if not sinful. In fact, she sometimes wondered if even her father had ever seen his wife in the nude. After all, many women in those days wore their nightgowns during sex, and often regarded their marital duty as indeed a duty, if not an actual burden. As for oral sex, Hanna had no idea such a thing existed until, very late in life, she had read a magazine article and expostulated in obvious shock, ‘But that’s like putting a cesspit into your mouth!’

Maria gave a rueful grin as she descended to the underground. Despite the crowds, she was still amazed by how quick and easy London journeys were. Maida Vale to Sutherland Street might seem a longish trek, yet a mere thirty minutes later, she was back in Pimlico and striding down the road to Amy’s house. As she turned the corner, she jumped aside to avoid a small girl on a scooter, hurtling towards her on the pavement – but jumped a
fraction
too late. The front wheel caught her shin, resulting in a sharp pain in her leg. The child was unhurt, thank God, but its mother came rushing up to investigate the damage, followed by a second, older girl.

‘Oh, Lord, you’re bleeding!’ the woman cried. ‘And there’s a big hole in your tights. I’m so terribly sorry. Polly’s such a clumsy child. Look, I’d feel a lot less bad if you came home with me and let me patch you up. I only live in the next street.’

‘And I live in
this
one,’ Maria replied, with a smile. ‘So please don’t worry – it’s nothing.’

The woman returned her smile. ‘That means we’re almost neighbours, which seems a pretty good reason to get to know each other. This area’s not exactly friendly.’

‘Mummy, I’m
cold
,’ the small child wailed.