Chapter Nine #3
They walked on in silence for a while. Alice thought about what Bron had said.
It was beyond her vocabulary to explain the feelings she had for Mr Wentworth.
When they were alone together, working, there was such a sense of connection between them, she felt he understood her as no-one else ever had.
After a lifetime of being judged for her prettiness, or lack thereof – over which she had no control – now at last here was someone who rated her solely on her ability with the pencil and brush.
The intensity was overwhelming; the air seemed almost to crackle.
She felt as though nothing was beyond her reach.
At the end of a lesson she came away feeling almost dizzy: happy, excited, out of touch with the real world, as if she were floating an inch above the pavement in a rainbow-coloured bubble.
She didn’t know what it felt like to be drunk, but she imagined it was something like that.
Was it dangerous? She’d had a sense, from that first lesson when he had shown her Olympe, when he had talked about things girls were never talked to about, that she was living on the edge of – what?
A precipice? A line, at any rate, that marked off the usual from the unconventional.
And it was exciting. He had talked about her freeing her mind from the chains of convention.
If she was to be a true artist, her imagination must be able to roam unfettered.
There must be nothing she did not dare to think.
Or do?
She felt an inward shiver. There were places well-brought-up girls did not go.
But was an artist different? She looked up to him, pupil to master, but he had begun to treat her with respect, as if she might one day step onto the high plain where he dwelled.
And if she did, what then? If the bond she believed they shared changed into something more personal, would that be a bad thing?
She allowed herself to dream of a future in which they were not just master and novice, but lovers…
Suppose he asked her to marry him. They could work together, helping, supporting, inspiring each other…
She might be his muse. She imagined a future biography: His marriage to Alice Tallant marked the most productive period of his life.
She inspired him to ever greater heights…
Perhaps they would go to Paris, join a group of other artists, live a Bohemian life.
She wasn’t clear what that was, but she imagined at the least it meant females were treated as equals.
Their work would be taken seriously. They would speak up, and their opinions would be heard.
Opinions? She felt a slight qualm: she was aware of her ignorance.
She had never been to school, or had a proper governess.
She knew nothing. Geography, for instance – she’d had a dissected puzzle when she was little, but all she remembered was that Italy was the shape of a riding boot, because one of Papa’s dogs had run off with it and they’d never found it, leaving a hole in the middle.
History? There’d been a book, A Child’s History of England, but it was the coloured plates she remembered: a dashing Roman chariot, Henry the fifth, Queen Elizabeth at Tilbury.
She’d liked the pictures that had horses in them.
She’d read hardly any serious books. Ironically, she had read more since she’d been borrowing books for Axe (oh, Axe!) than ever before.
Of astronomy, science, politics she knew nothing. But she wanted to learn, she wanted to know things. She loved it when Wentworth talked about Greek and Roman art. If they were together, he would help her. She saw herself, one of the Bohemian set, devouring books, becoming a better person—
Someone brushed roughly past her, bringing her back to the present. Piccadilly was crowded as always, and they had to thread their way through the mass of hurrying people. Bron was saying something – she hadn’t taken it in.
‘I’m sorry, what did you say?’
‘I was asking what today’s lesson would be.’
‘A model is coming in,’ she answered. ‘So, you see, I shan’t be alone with him, if that’s what you’re worried about.’
Ivor Wentworth’s house in Stafford Street, a short walk from the school, had a housekeeper, but after Alice’s first visit she had been told to let herself in.
The street door was not locked when she was expected, and the housekeeper kept to her quarters in the basement, so it made sense not to call her up the stairs just to admit Alice.
She made her way up to the big first-floor room where the lessons took place, which was at the front of the house with a bay window onto the street. Wentworth was sitting on the edge of his desk in the bay, arms folded, talking to a young woman in a dark two-piece and a rather shabby hat.
‘Ah, Miss Tallant,’ he said, standing up.
The first sight of him always gave Alice a little pang of – was it pleasure or excitement?
Or both? A pang, at any rate, in the pit of her stomach.
After Bron’s talk she had to be honest and admit that his physical person was attractive.
Occasionally while they were working he had touched her, brushing against her accidentally, or putting his hand over hers holding the pencil to show her some technique, and she had been acutely aware of his touch.
‘This is Miss Partridge, who models for me,’ he was saying.
Alice smiled and said how do you do, but the model’s expression was as blank as that of a fish on a slab. ‘Go and get changed,’ Wentworth told her, and she disappeared obediently through the door into the back room.
Wentworth turned away to look at some sheets of paper on the desk, and Alice occupied the hiatus with taking off her coat and hat, putting on her overall, and sorting out the materials that had been left out for her.
In a short time Miss Partridge emerged dressed in a sort of Greek chiton of flimsy white material, belted at the waist and clasped at the shoulders, leaving her arms bare, and with her hair, which was dark and rather greasy-looking, done in a knot behind.
Without a word she walked over to the high stool set up at the end of the room and perched on it.
Alice noted that she seemed to be in her late twenties, and had an oval face that was neither pretty nor particularly plain, and might have been attractive had it not been for the entire lack of expression.
The blankness made her face seem like nothing more than marks on a piece of paper.
If Alice had met her in a month’s time on the street, she probably would not have recognised her.
A model, she thought, but not a muse. The idea pleased her.
Wentworth turned from his desk. ‘We begin,’ he said.
Alice concentrated on her work, helped by the marble indifference of Miss Partridge, who appeared to be thinking of something far removed, perhaps composing a laundry list in her head.
Wentworth arranged her into different poses, handling her limbs and altering the angle of her head as if she was a wooden dummy, a proceeding she did not appear to resent.
After half a dozen poses, Wentworth pulled the fabric away from her legs, exposing the nearer one entirely from where it joined the trunk, and with his pointer ran over the curve, talking to Alice about muscles and shading.
The angle evidently did not please him, for he took hold of the leg in both hands and changed it.
He stood back and looked, then undid the clasp on the model’s shoulder and pulled the fabric down, exposing the left breast.
Alice had looked at plenty of paintings of naked women in the last few weeks, but a live model was different.
A living woman’s actual bare breast caused the heat to rise behind her face again – not a blush, but a prickling sensation of something like shock or shame.
She forced herself to look, telling herself, in Wentworth’s voice, that she had to free herself from the shackles of convention.
And found him gazing at her. ‘Is there a problem, Miss Tallant?’
Her mouth was dry. ‘No,’ she croaked.
‘A breast, Miss Tallant, is merely a handful of flesh. A curve, no different from the curve of the cheek.’ He ran the pointer down Miss Partridge’s face, and Alice was impressed that she didn’t flinch as the sharp end came close to her eye.
‘Over the ages we have mythologised it, we have forced on it a significance that, if we use our common sense, we see it cannot bear.’
‘Yes,’ Alice said, feeling something was required of her.
‘And yet,’ he said, ‘it is different from all other handfuls. It is the seat of beauty, the source of life, literally and figuratively, the lovely poitrine, which nourishes man from his first breath. And continues to hold sway over his mind into adulthood.’
She frowned at his contradictory rhetoric, and he smiled. ‘Draw, Miss Tallant. Look, and draw. Especially look. It is novelty that makes you blush. Accustomedness is all.’
He was right, of course. The effort of concentration and control needed to represent the figure on the paper soon made it as ordinary as a table lamp or a bowl of oranges.
Even when, later, he unfastened the chiton completely and Alice had to draw the figure naked, apart from the remaining fold of fabric across the lap, she had no further difficulties.
Giles was angry on Richard’s behalf, but he couldn’t hide his relief when Richard said he wanted no retaliation against Shacklock.
‘The man’s mad,’ Richard said. ‘Taking him to court would serve no purpose. He probably won’t even remember the incident.’
‘It would be awkward,’ Giles offered cautiously, ‘given that he’s our next neighbour. And our father never got any satisfaction from the law. But I don’t like the idea that he thinks he can behave like that. There ought to be consequences.’