Chapter 7 #2
Her parents still didn’t understand what she was doing working here, and why she had moved out to live in a grotty room in a boarding house in Bayswater.
‘You get the same money here, and you don’t have your rent to worry about. You’re wasting money and time,’ her mum had said.
The thought of being elbow deep in sausage meat for the rest of her life, stuffing cases for the bangers her father was so famous for, or mixing up the filling for the steak and kidney pies, made Stella shudder.
She’d been squirrelling away her wages for ages without telling her parents her dream of going to art school one day, for they’d laugh like drains at the notion.
But drawing was her escape. Painting, too, when she could afford the materials.
That was how she’d ended up here. She’d had a little bit of birthday money so had headed up to the West End to a tiny cobbled street and a shop with a dark green door, the name Monsieur Corbières in gilded capitals over the double-fronted window.
As soon as she stepped over the threshold, she felt butterflies in her stomach and a peculiar tingling in her fingers.
Her brain started racing with all the possibilities.
How on earth could she choose what to spend her money on?
Inside it was a glorious muddle of shelves and tables and cabinets piled high in the most haphazard fashion.
Paint tubes, bulging with slick, oily colours ready to be squeezed out: cobalt blue, regal magenta, vibrant scarlet.
Brushes, some as fine as an eyelash, others as thick as the one her father used to shave each morning.
Bundles of pencils, ranging from pin sharp and hard to blunt and caressingly soft.
And reams of deliciously blank paper, from smooth and shiny to thick and bumpy and rough.
There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to how it was displayed.
You just had to search for what you wanted, hoping you might come across it somewhere amidst the mayhem.
There were easels, palettes, stacks of art books, some left open, as if the reader had wandered off in the middle.
Everywhere seemed covered in a fine layer of dust. It was a treasure trove.
Stella spent a happy hour wandering around, looking, touching, stroking, absorbing it all.
It was like a sweet shop to her, as mouth-watering as jars of bullseyes and liquorice all-sorts.
The shop was quiet, with an elderly gentleman who pottered in and out.
He was small and round and dapper, and seemed to be busy doing nothing, but not once did he put her under pressure, just gave her an absent-minded nod.
Gradually, she gathered up the things she wanted.
A sketchbook, a clutch of pencils, a sturdy rubber, a small box of watercolour paints and, finally, a magnificent squirrel hair brush that finished in a satisfying point.
As she walked to the counter, she realised she didn’t want to leave.
‘All of these, please,’ she said to the man.
‘Very good,’ he said, with a pronounced French accent.
She stood at the counter while he added up the tally and her purchases were wrapped, daydreaming about her next day off, how she would jump on the train to the countryside armed with a cheese and tomato sandwich and her newly acquired purchases.
And then her eyes fell upon a handwritten notice pinned up on the wall.
SHOP ASSISTANT WANTED
FIVE DAYS A WEEK
KNOWLEDGE OF ART MATERIALS AN ADVANTAGE
PLEASE ENQUIRE TO MONSIEUR CORBIèRES
She stared at it for a full half a minute.
She knew she didn’t want to stay at the butcher’s shop for much longer.
If she carried on, she would be swallowed up by blood-soaked sawdust and would never escape the sweet, metallic tang that hung in the air.
She could be here instead, breathing in paint and turpentine and pencil shavings, mixing with people who understood the urge to put the images inside their mind onto paper.
As Monsieur Corbières wrapped the final box with a flourish, Stella cleared her throat.
This was the first time in her life she’d been presented with a chance to step out of the world she knew so well, and into another.
Surely it couldn’t be that easy? She had to get it right. She indicated the sign.
‘Are you Mister Corbières?’
‘Monsieur,’ he corrected her.
‘Are you still looking for someone? To help in the shop.’
He looked at her with the gaze of an artist who took in every feature, every detail, as if appraising her, before he decided on his reply.
‘I am.’
‘How do I apply?’
‘Well.’ He put the five packages inside a bag. ‘We talk. I decide if I like you.’
‘Oh.’ She smiled. ‘Fair dos.’
He put his hands on the counter top. ‘Tell me why you want to work here.’
‘Because …’ She looked around for a moment. ‘I’ve never been here before, but it feels so full of possibility. Full of pictures that have never been painted. What could be more wonderful than that?’
He looked surprised by her answer. ‘And where do you work now?’
Stella took a deep breath. He might take some convincing.
‘I work for my dad. In his butcher’s shop.
Me and my mum make the sausages and the pies, and we sort out the bills.
So I’m good at maths, and dealing with people.
And I can drive – I do the deliveries sometimes.
But honestly, I’ll go mad if I stay there much longer. There’s more to life than sausages.’
‘It is a good trade, the butcher.’ Monsieur Corbières patted his stomach. ‘It is important to eat.’
‘Oh yes, but I want to learn how to think.’
He chuckled. ‘You are crazy if you think you will learn the answer to anything in here. Artists drive you mad. They forget to pay their bills—’
‘Oh, I could sort that out. That’s another one of my jobs – chasing payments.
I’m never afraid to ask for money.’ She was building in confidence as she spoke.
Her eyes darted around the shop. ‘And I’m good at keeping places clean and tidy.
You can’t have a filthy shop when you’re a butcher. You’d be out of business in minutes.’
‘You think it is filthy in here?’ He seemed surprised, as if he hadn’t noticed the chaos.
‘No! No, no, no.’ She panicked she had offended him. ‘But it could do with a little reorganising.’ That was saying something.
‘Hmm.’ Monsieur Corbières looked at her. ‘You must understand, I’m getting old. I forget things. I get cross with people. I get tired too. But I want to stay here until I die. So, I need someone who knows where everything is, what to order, what each customer wants.’
Stella grinned. ‘I could do that, easy.’
‘Can you make proper coffee?’
‘No. We only drink tea at home. But I could learn.’
‘And your name?’
‘Stella. Stella Knight.’
‘And do you paint, Stella Knight?’
She shrugged, embarrassed. ‘I do when I can. I love it.’
‘You must let me see.’
‘I couldn’t.’ She was half-laughing. ‘I’ve never had any proper lessons. We didn’t even have an art teacher at my school. So I’m pretty terrible.’
‘It is much better to think you are terrible. It is the only way to improve.’ He leaned in. ‘The worst artists are the ones who think they are great.’
‘Oh. I’ve never thought about it like that.’ Stella looked at him thoughtfully. She might learn rather a lot from Monsieur Corbières if she played her cards right.
‘Can you start … tomorrow?’ he was asking.
Stella swallowed. Her parents weren’t going to like it one bit. But she knew this was a chance she couldn’t let slip through her fingers, that it was a stepping stone, that if she didn’t fight for it she’d be stuck stuffing sausages until the end of time.
‘What about Monday?’ she said, for she was pretty certain Monsieur Corbières didn’t have anyone else up his sleeve.
His black eyes gleamed with pleasure and he held out a plump little paw for her to shake.
And now, here she was, his right-hand girl.
Order had been restored. It had taken her a while to organise the shop, but she had pulled everything out, dusted and polished, and put everything in a logical place, in pleasing rows and serried ranks.
She could put her hand on whatever anyone wanted straight away, instead of sifting through the entire contents.
There was a system for ordering so they never ran out of anything.
‘You are a miracle,’ Monsieur Corbières had murmured. ‘What if you had never come here?’
‘It doesn’t bear thinking about, Mr C,’ she told him, and she meant that, because she had never been happier.
Today, though, she felt slightly off kilter.
What had happened had shifted her view of the world somewhat.
Confronting Edwin about the poster had made her realise that people could do things that affected you and there was nothing you could do about it.
Of course, she knew that you couldn’t control everything in the world – the ominous rumblings in the news about war with Germany were becoming even more urgent – but until now she had been in charge of her destiny, making her own choices, calculated decisions underpinned by logic and practicality and simple maths.
What with the posters, and Edwin’s reaction to her reaction, and her reaction to him asking her out to dinner – not the one she’d shown him, but how she’d felt inside – she sensed a little bit of power slipping away.
And she panicked. If you let your heart rule your head, that’s when the trouble started.
When she walked past the poster on Russell Square that evening, and saw herself in the arms of the man she didn’t know, she wondered if it was Edwin, if he’d painted himself into the picture.
She knew a part of her hoped he had. She blushed as she hurried down the steps into the Underground, then squashed herself into the carriage with all the other passengers.
She shut her eyes and let herself wonder what would have happened if she’d said yes to dinner.
If that was how the evening would have ended?
Was that his fantasy on the poster? Or was it quickly becoming hers?
Next time, she decided, she would say yes to dinner. If he asked her.
Stella sighed, and flipped open her sketchbook.
She’d spent long enough reminiscing. It went in phases, her need to remember him, and it was particularly intense at the moment, for some reason.
If she was going to meet the deadline she’d set herself, she couldn’t spend her spare time day dreaming.
She would visit his memorial tomorrow, while Ted was at his friend’s.
That might bring her some comfort, but for now, she needed to work.
She gazed at the opposite bank, and let her imagination wander, to a boy in a striped jumper and baggy shorts straddling the thickest branch of the willow tree opposite, grinning from ear to ear.
The leader of the Towpath Gang. She could see his grubby knees and his fat little toes in her mind’s eye, and she began to draw, her pencil skating over the paper as lightly and swiftly as the iridescent damselflies scudding along the surface of the water.