An Enormous Yes (8 page)

‘Yes, I must say I agree.’ Maria was all too conscious of the soaring façade of the cathedral; the whole impressive building and its contents were so richly ostentatious that, if they were sold for ready cash, the proceeds could have fed every homeless person in the land.

‘And He told us to love our neighbour – meaning
all
our neighbours, not just those with a foot on the housing ladder.’

As the woman continued to express her indignation, Maria suddenly realized that she felt part of a community for the first time since she had moved to London. All the people here were exchanging views and mingling, instead of the usual London habit of simply looking through their fellow human beings, as if they didn’t exist.

So, on the stroke of four, she abandoned her misgivings and stretched out on the pavement, along with everyone else – young and old, well-heeled and
homeless, all lying down in unison. At first, she did feel a certain
embarrassment
, in case one of Amy’s wealthy local friends happened to pass by, saw her lying on the ground and recoiled in horrified dismay. She was also worried about dirtying her jeans before this all-important evening. Yet, as she glanced around at all the prostrate bodies, she experienced a sense of solidarity, just as the man had said. Her feet were all but touching another woman’s head; her hand brushing some old fellow’s arm. These people might be strangers, but she was joined with them in body and in purpose.

She gazed up at the sky. However hard the ground might be, above her were soft fluffy clouds, and she spotted one lone gull, flying high, high, high, and began following its progress, until white was swallowed up in white.

Her spirits seemed to rise with the bird. She knew Felix was a radical type who might well approve her action and, if nothing else, it would provide her with a talking point this evening. And, she realized, with a sense of mingled surprise and relief, for the first time since his invitation, she
actually
felt confident.

Once the protesters had disbanded, she couldn’t resist slipping into the cathedral. Since her return to the faith in 1974, she’d been as assiduous in her religious practice as she had before her fall from grace, and the ensuing decades of fervent devotion had left an indelible mark. Even now, when her religion constituted little more than a bedrock of indoctrination, suffused with incense-clouds of nostalgia, churches still attracted her; seemed to answer some deep-seated need.

She walked slowly up the aisle, thrilling, as always, to the sheer
splendour
of this place. However uneasy she might feel about ecclesiastical wealth, when it came to aesthetics, she couldn’t help but respond to the gleaming marble and glittering mosaics, the theatrical sense of space.

She stopped to peer up at the huge painted crucifix suspended over the sanctuary, recalling, with wry amusement, that the only naked male body she had seen until her twenties was that of the crucified Christ – a body racked with pain. But it had seemed normal, as a child, that religion should be so deeply infused with suffering, what with the Agony in the Garden, the Passion and the Crucifixion, and the emphasis on this earthly existence as being, essentially, a Vale of Tears. Yet only now did she recognize that there had also been a strongly sexual element: the way she had burned with rapture when kneeling for hours in front of the Blessed Sacrament, and her all-consuming passion for God, not just as Father, but as soul-mate and spiritual lover. Even Confession possessed an erotic charge: whispering her
secret sins to a
man
– and not just any man, but God’s representative on earth.

As she passed a stand ablaze with votive candles, she remembered, as a girl, spending all her pocket money on lighting candles for her school friends, or for anyone in need. And she still felt, quite irrationally, that those flickering flames could somehow reach to Heaven and influence the Almighty – however childish such a notion. Indeed, she intended to light a candle for herself, and light it just outside the Lady Chapel, since her
namesake
, Mary, had been as familiar a figure in her childhood as her other mother, Hanna. Forty years ago, she had begged the Blessed Virgin for the strength to resist Silas’s strong sexual drive and thus retain her own virginity; now she was doing something much more reprehensible.

Having made her way to the far end of the cathedral, she put her money in the slot and lit her candle from one already burning in the stand. Then she walked towards the image of Our Lady, shimmering blue and gold above the Lady-Chapel altar.

‘Holy Mary,’ she mouthed, ‘what I’m asking – all I’m asking – is for this evening to go well, in every way.’

M
ARIA PAUSED OUTSIDE
the tall, terraced house, almost tempted to bolt for home. Inhaling deeply to try to calm her nerves, she made herself descend the basement steps – a basement very different from the one in Amy and Hugo’s house which, neglected by its (mostly absent) owner, looked drab and uninviting. Here the paint was bright and the brickwork spruce and on the edge of every steep stone step stood a flourishing green plant. Pots of cheery daffodils blew their yellow trumpets on the window ledges, and the front door had been painted in a geometric pattern, almost like a canvas itself.

She raised her hand to the knocker – a curious bird-shaped one, in bronze – then changed her mind and rang the bell instead. Awful if Felix didn’t hear and left her standing on the doorstep.

‘Maria, you look sensational!’

If only she didn’t blush – additional proof that she was still stuck in adolescence. He looked different from the Felix of the life class, dressed in a smart grey jacket and an open-necked red shirt.

He ushered her into the hall which, although dark and narrow, he had totally transformed. Literally hundreds of picture frames, all different styles and shapes, had been arranged side by side, one above the other – and even one inside another – floor to ceiling, on both walls, yet none of the frames held a painting.

‘It’s a sort of joke,’ he explained, as he watched her absorbing the display. ‘I mean, why bother painting anything at all, when an empty frame looks good in its own right?’

‘And they
do
look good – amazingly so. Are some of them quite old?’

‘Yes, a few date back to God knows when! Sometimes, I just pick one off the wall because it happens to be the perfect size or shape for a painting I’ve completed. But, look, come upstairs and let’s have a glass of wine.’

A twinge of panic rippled through her stomach. If she drank too much,
she might lose control. ‘No, let me see this room first,’ she said, boldly venturing through the open door on the left. ‘Oh – it’s like an Aladdin’s cave! Where did you find all these fantastic things?’

‘Mostly on my travels. The textiles come from Egypt and this
wrought-iron
lamp from Turkey, and that maquette over there I bought from a Dutch sculptor when I was teaching in Maastricht. It’s actually his mother, but it’s so expressionistic, the figure and the chair are fused into one shape. And those wooden masks are African, of course.’

Maria nodded, hoping he wouldn’t quiz her about her own travels – remarkable only for their absence.

‘I love searching bazaars and markets and hunting down something really special. Although I must admit I often have to sort through loads of tat before I find a treasure. See this,’ he said, gesturing to a glass case on the shelf, which held a desiccated brown object she couldn’t quite make out in the dim light of the basement. ‘It’s one of my best finds – a shrunken human head from Papua New Guinea, which I picked up in a Parisian flea market a good thirty years ago.’

‘It looks far too small to be human,’ Maria exclaimed, half-fascinated, half-repelled.

‘Well, most so-called human heads turn out to be fakes, but this one’s probably genuine.’ He removed the glass cover and ushered Maria closer to the shelf. ‘You see, I know a bit about the shrinking process and it appears that all the different steps have been taken with this chap. What they do is remove the skull and brain, sew the eyelids shut, and keep boiling and
reboiling
the remaining skin and flesh, until it gets smaller and smaller. Then they dry it and reshape it and coat the skin with ash.’

Maria suppressed a shudder as she stared at the shrivelled head; still recognizably human, despite its diminutive size and distorted features.

Felix caressed its fringe of coarse black hair. ‘It’s odd to think I share my flat with a fellow human being who lived aeons ago, in a completely different culture. Sometimes, I even sense his presence, however strange that sounds.’

The pained and almost pleading expression on the unfortunate man’s face made Maria feel uneasy, so she turned away and began looking at the paintings on the opposite side of the room. ‘Is this your work?’ she asked.

‘Well, yes, but very ancient stuff. My more recent work is upstairs in the studio.’

Despite his dismissive tone, she studied one of the canvases with close and careful attention, admiring the swirls of black and scarlet, overlaying a deep ochre ground. ‘It has such energy,’ she enthused, ‘as if all the colours are flying out of the frame!’

‘I did it years and years ago,’ he gave a casual shrug, ‘when I was more into abstraction.’

She scrutinized another painting, in which a female figure’s lips and brows seemed to have been rendered in 3D. ‘Is that some sort of textile?’ she asked, indicating the mouth.

‘They’re actually those miniature trees that architects use in their plans. I cut them even smaller, then painted them brown for the eyebrows and red for the lips, to give a sort of textured effect. But, look, don’t waste your time on these. I’d prefer you to see what I hope is my better work – although, I have to say, I’m dying for a drink. I’ve had a pretty hairy day, to be honest, so I’d really like to sit down and relax. I can show you my studio later, if that’s all right with you?’

He led her up to the ground-floor sitting-room – unlike any room she had ever seen, with its wooden shutters and panels of rough brick, set between plain whitewashed walls and, again, a wealth of objects arrayed on every side. The room was small, in fact, and the remaining three floors of the house belonged to another tenant, so he had told her at the class, yet the
impression
was one of expansiveness, largesse. Amy and Hugo’s house might be markedly grander, but considerations of fashion and ‘good taste’ dictated its general style, rather than springing from an original mind, as here.

‘Do sit down.’ He gestured to the sofa, itself draped with some exotic fabric, presumably from another of his trips. ‘And I’ll open a bottle of wine.’

‘Lovely,’ she said, vowing to restrict herself to just one glass.

He returned with two pewter goblets and set hers down on a small table beside the sofa, then seated himself, rather too close, she felt. All at once, the images of his naked body, conjured up earlier today, began returning in a fevered rush, increasing her apprehension.

‘Well, here’s to your work.’ He smiled, touching his goblet to hers.

‘It’s hardly “work”, as yet,’ she said, struggling to censor the images and adopt a detached and distant tone. ‘I’m shamefully out of practice.’

‘So you keep telling me, Maria, but that makes me all the more impressed by what you’ve done so far. No, don’t contradict me – I’ve been teaching for donkey’s years and I know talent when I see it. Some of my other students have been slaving away for decades, but they lack that vital spark that marks them out as special. They also lack your total commitment. I noticed that at the very first class. You seemed to be drinking in everything I said, as if you just couldn’t get enough of it. In fact, you reminded me of a starving woman suddenly offered food.’

She gave a nervous laugh. ‘I’m afraid I’m a hungry sort of person
altogether
. Even as a child, I was greedy for all sorts of things. At my convent
school, they came down really hard on that and insisted I learn strict
self-control
. They kept stressing that greed is one of the worst of sins, because it meant I was selfish and acquisitive.’

‘Greed is
wonderful
,’ he contradicted. ‘It goes along with exuberance and enthusiasm. Blasé, cynical people are very rarely greedy, because nothing seems worth their while. And, anyway, it’s built into our DNA, to help us humans find the best food and shelter – not to mention the best mates! And, as artists, it’s one of our duties to be greedy for success – which you
are
, Maria. I can see that very clearly.’

He flung his arm along the sofa-back; his hand a provocative
hairs-breadth
from her neck. ‘If you really want to know, what first attracted me about you was your total engagement with every aspect of the class – Leo’s studio, the model, the other students, the view from the window, even that board I gave you, for heaven’s sake! I found myself intrigued by your famished desire to cram in even….’

The rest of the sentence was blurring. She was still focused on his earlier words: ‘What first attracted me about you….’ So she
hadn’t
imagined his interest, but how on earth would she handle it? She might be out of
practice
as an artist, but when it came to real relationships with men – as against mere fantasy and longing – she was almost a non-starter. Silas had been
life-changing
, but only a one-off – a single, shameful lapse – and, since her return to the Church, she had maintained a strictly celibate life. However incredible that might seem to her less devout and more promiscuous friends, she had seen it as her basic religious duty, and also a private
atonement
for the pain she had caused her mother and the stigma laid on Amy. And although nowadays, with her faith so weak and wobbly, there was less need for sexual abstinence, she’d had no chance to change her habits, since at her age lovers were conspicuous by their absence.

The arm along the sofa-back was moving down to encircle her shoulders and began pressing insistently close. ‘In fact, I’ve been asking myself
continually
what it would be like to kiss you. Would you show the same enthusiasm, I wonder?’

Warning voices in her head, long entrenched since childhood, were giving her advice: ‘Leave immediately! Don’t consider such a thing. Show him you have standards.’ And Hanna’s voice was admonishing, ‘He’s simply taking advantage of you. Don’t risk your eternal soul.’ And, added to those, her own diffident self was reminding her that encouragement at this stage might well mean that, at some point in the future, she would have to reveal her body and, since it was a mature and far from slender body, risk rejection in the process.

Yet, above all the cacophony, another voice – a voice she didn’t
recognize
, brazen, wild and, yes, ravenously hungry – was already giving him his answer.

‘Well, why don’t you try and see?’