Then Alice
Then
Alice
Emancipation from my parents is at once exhilarating and terrifying. I have stood up to my father for the first time in my life, and although I cry throughout most of the journey home, Jake driving with one hand on the steering wheel, the other clamped around my own, beneath the tears is the fierce thrust of pride. I am not like my mother and I never will be.
‘Actually this is all very hip,’ Jake says, emphasising the word, because he always knows how to make me laugh. ‘We are living through the decade of liberation, and you, Alice Garland, are at the coalface.’
I move my belongings – two paltry black bin liners of clothes and books and about a hundred sketchpads – out of my student lodgings into Jake’s flat. My bottles of shampoo and conditioner line his bath, my clothes in two drawers he has cleared out for me.
‘Let’s buy you things to make this place feel more like yours,’ he says on the first night, as we lie naked and entwined on his brown corduroy sofa, surrounded by candlelight.
‘Everything I need is right here,’ I say, smoothing my hand across the S of his body, his thigh curving into his hip, the dip of flesh beneath his ribcage.
But Jake shakes his head.
‘I’m serious. I want this flat to feel as much yours as mine.’
He takes me to Nice Irma’s Floating Carpet to stock up on wine-coloured beanbags, joss sticks, a rug of swirling brown and orange, a wall hanging of a bejewelled Shiva.
He loves to surprise me with gifts, small things to begin with: an orange jug he has filled with sunflowers, a pair of striped woolly socks he bought at the market because my feet are always so cold, second-hand copies of A Room with a View and The Leopard in preparation for our trip to Italy.
Then one afternoon I come back to a little wooden desk in the corner of the sitting room, the kind we used to have at school, with a lid and a hole for the inkwell. Jake has filled it with my sketchpads and watercolours, my pencils in a holder made from a baked beans can rewrapped in bright blue paper. It’s so touching, this gesture, that unexpectedly I find myself crying, and he pulls me into his arms, his face anxious.
‘It’s meant to make you happy.’
‘I am happy,’ I say, crying even more, though I’m laughing too.
‘I’m your family now. And you are mine. We don’t need anyone else.’
Now our evenings are spent working, me drawing at the little desk, Jake on the sofa or the floor, picking out chords on his guitar, writing lyrics in his notebook. If he’s songwriting we work in silence, the focus of one motivating the other so that often it will be one or two in the morning before we stop.
We’ll go to bed exhausted and fall asleep straight away, but then I’ll wake again a few hours later and realise I’m alone. I’ll stumble through to the sitting room and Jake is always there, surrounded by candlelight, hunched over his guitar. Once I stood in the doorway watching, and the expression on his face shocked me; I knew I was witnessing something private, something he always tries to hide. I crept away and went back to bed, but it was impossible to forget the pain I’d seen, pain and something even more menacing. To me, standing there, it looked like hatred or despair.
With his music, at least, Jake’s self-belief is unfaltering. He never has any doubt about whether he has what it takes to succeed.
When Robin offered me a show at his gallery, I had second thoughts immediately afterwards.
‘I’m not ready for this,’ I told Jake again and again, until he finally became impatient.
‘How can you expect people to believe in you if you don’t believe in yourself? Robin hasn’t offered you a show as a favour to me. He’s a businessman; he thinks your work will sell. He knows it will.’
Jake tells me – and I know he is right – that a childhood lived in the shadow of a volatile and vengeful father has corrupted my self-confidence. But slowly I am learning.
Robin Armstrong, more than any other dealer and gallerist in London, has the power to accelerate an artist’s career; it’s hard not to feel like an imposter when it’s me, not Rick or any of the other star students from the years above, who is getting this break.
As soon as Lawrence Croft hears of my impending show, he calls a meeting with Gordon and Rita.
‘I can safely say we’ve never had this happen to a first-year student before. Congratulations, Alice,’ Lawrence says. ‘What an opportunity. We must think how we can best support you.’
‘You deserve this,’ Rita says. ‘The work you’ve been doing in class recently is outstanding. You’ve really put the hours in.’
That, at least, is true. These past two weeks, Jake and I have barely slept, working through the nights. And how I have loved it, the silent consensus that the two of us are wholly committed to our art. It is Jake who has made me feel like an artist and not a fraud.
Gordon says, ‘It seems to me that next term Alice should be allowed to focus solely on her work for the show, and this can count towards her degree. Rita and I can oversee her progress with one-to-one tutorials. It’s true that you have great skill, Alice, and you deserve to succeed. But the thing that really distinguishes you from your associates is your grit.’
Later Jake takes me to Kettner’s, our customary haunt for celebrations big and small. We order four seasons pizza and drink house white from a small carafe.
‘The thing about you, Alice Garland,’ he says in a mock-Scottish accent, ‘is that you’re full of grit.’
Later, though, in the darkness, curled around each other in bed, he reaches for my hand.
‘He’s right, you know,’ he says. ‘You do have grit. And it’s your childhood that’s done it, weathering the years with your pig of a father. Standing up to him like you did the other day. I’m proud of you.’
I cannot see his face clearly, but I know that he is watching me, doing that thing where he hopes to transfer all his thoughts to me without words.
‘You’re a survivor, Alice,’ he says just before we both fall asleep.
A throwaway line that would turn out to be more prescient than I could ever have imagined.