Life: An Exploded Diagram

  “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.”

  S
o 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.

  IN ALL, HE made five drawings of her. The best one, in his opinion, was of her naked back.

  He asked her to sit facing the window, cross-legged, with her hands in her lap.

  She said, “I’m cold.”

  “Wait,” Clem said. He lit the remains of three candles glued by their own wax on to a short plank of wood, then closed the shutters.

  “Is that all right?”

  “As long as you’re quick.”

  He’d added five sticks of pastel to his kit. He used one to yellow the central area of the paper into candlelight. Her right side was slightly uplit from the open doorway, and he chalked the curve of it, highlighting the shoulder blade, marveling at the swell of her hips. As always, he blacked out everything surrounding her, then, with a soft pencil, devoted himself to the delicacy of her flesh. Again, he made her a glowing abstraction. He could hardly see what he was doing, but that didn’t matter. Drawing her had become an act of love, of seduction. A ritual.

  He showed her his work, disowning it.

  Still studying it, she sighed and dragged him down onto her. Parting for him. Letting him do almost everything.

  Pulling away at the last fevered moment because —

  “We mustn’t. I can’t. . . . You know I . . .”

  He rolled onto his back. She watched his chest rise and fall to his quickened breathing.

  “Clem?”

  “Yeah. I know. Sorry.”

  “You’re not angry, are you?”

  “No.”

  “You are.”

  He turned his face to hers, touched it with the backs of his fingers.

  “I’m not. I love you, Frankie. It don’t matter.”

  “It does, actually.” She bit her lip. “It’s not that I . . .”

  “I know. It’s all right.”

  Then everything diminished. Clem went back to school. The autumn evenings dwindled and chilled. Now they had only weekends and could not rely on those.

  They lost the second to savage rain.

  He sat through classes a lummox.

  “Ackroyd? Ackroyd!”

  “Sir?”

  Tash Harmsworth was glaring at him.

  “You are, I believe, reading the part of the Fool?”

  “Sir.”

  “King Lear’s Fool is a jester, a wit, not an idiot. Therefore it is not necessary for you to adopt the facial expression of a demented sheep. It is, however, necessary that you read the lines aloud.”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  Goz slid a helpful finger onto the page.

  Clem cleared his throat, if not his mind.

  “‘Dost thou know the difference, my boy, between a bitter fool and a sweet fool?’”

  On the morning of the third Friday of term, he knew that he couldn’t get through the day. It had been eleven days since he’d been with her. The effort of hiding his dejection, let alone his anguished tumescence, from his parents was exhausting him. He was terribly afraid that if he did not regularly tend the fire of Frankie’s love, it would go out. Eleven days! Ashes, ashes. He wanted to be alone to grieve.

  At the corner of Norwich Road, he said, “Goz, wait a minute.”

  Goz braked and came back.

  “What?”

  “I’m gorna skive off for the day.”

  “And why is that, comrade?”

  “I just am.”

  Goz cocked his head.

  “Art thou meeting thine own true love, where a ‘willow grows aslant a brook’?”

  It was a morning of shifting drizzle. They both wore the awful and compulsory school raincoats.

  “There’s no need to take the piss. Anyway, no.”

  “Anything you want me to say, if they ask?”

  Clem shrugged. “I dunno. I don’t care. Whatever you like.”

  “Right. Please, sir, when I called for Ackroyd, there was a cross crudely painted on the front door. I assumed the Plague had spread to Lovelace Road, so I hastened by with a bunch of medicinal herbs pressed to my nose. I expect they’re shoveling quicklime onto
his bloated corpse as we speak.”

  “Yeah. Ideal.”

  “I’ll drop the homework round later, then, shall I? Fiveish?”

  The weather was in two minds. Behind the veils of mizzle, the sky was a white glare. Half a mile along the Gunston road, Clem, sweating, stopped and took off the raincoat. He rolled it up and belted it to his handlebars, then stood gazing into the blurred ocher distance. His moment of liberation had passed; now the thought of the lonely and silent day ahead was dreadful. Instantly, he was overwhelmed by self-pity, dizzied by it. He leaned his forearms on the bundled raincoat and lowered his head, gasping in air, fighting back tears.

  He couldn’t go home. The house would be empty, but some nosy bleddy neighbor would see him and be around as soon as his mother came home, pretending concern for his health.

  Onward to Franklins, then. There was nowhere else.

  The approach to the remains of the house was carpeted with big five-pointed sycamore leaves: stars cut out of yellow paper by inexpert children. They attached themselves to his wet shoes. He trudged around the corner of the barn, then, at the doorway, recoiled in shock when he found himself face-to-face with Marron. The horse was alarmed, too, throwing its head up and backing away.

  “Frankie?”

  A small frightened cry from above. A scuffling.

  He thought, She’s here with somebody else.

  Her face, all eyes, appeared below the rail of the loft.

  “Clem?” It was not much more than a whisper.

  He eased past Marron and stumbled up the stairs. The shutters were only slightly ajar, and he stood unsighted for several seconds, holding on to the stair post. Neither of them spoke; they stared at each other almost as if each had trespassed onto the other’s private space. Caught each other out.

  She was alone. Thank God, thank God. Kneeling. Wearing a black turtleneck sweater and brown cord trousers. A heavy-looking waterproof jacket was spread over the sleeping bag.

  At last she said, “I’ve never seen you in your school uniform. It’s terribly smart.”

  “Frankie.”

  “How did you know I was here?”

  “I didn’t. I just . . .”

  “You just knew.”