Chapter 38
IT WAS A balmy evening; the baking heat of the early September sun had not dissipated, which was lucky considering tonight’s workshop at the café was a life-drawing class.
Malcolm, who was more than comfortable with nudity, had offered to be the model.
The first evening workshops they had offered over the summer had been a great success.
Helena was running a weekly cookery class for beginners – Derek was delighted that he could now not only make himself a boiled egg for breakfast, but even an omelette or poached eggs.
She had done baking masterclasses and there had been a sound bowl meditation run by Johnny’s yoga teacher client Giselle, who was now also offering a popular Monday evening yoga class.
One of Jennie’s colleagues at the secondary school was running tonight’s session; her name was Willow and she was the art teacher there.
She was just how Helena envisioned an art teacher to be, all flowing skirts and wavy golden hair.
With her almond shaped green eyes, she looked like she’d stepped out of a Botticelli painting.
Helena helped Jennie and Willow put out the easels that they had brought over from school, each one set up with a wooden board and a sheet of parchment taped across the top.
As the participants arrived, Helena poured them all a welcome drink and offered them freshly baked cheese straws, which smelt delicious, hoping that a glass or two of prosecco or beer would dispel any nerves and get people’s creative juices flowing.
Malcolm, who didn’t drink, slipped into the bathroom to put his robe on.
Willow had positioned a chair on a stage which she had fashioned from the same blocks they had borrowed for the band to play on at the fete.
These had been delivered that afternoon by a red-cheeked Mr Knowles, who had finally plucked up the courage to ask Jennie for her number, much to Helena’s delight.
She had thought she’d noticed some flirtatious looks as they’d run their stalls side by side at the fete.
As a final touch, Willow had draped the stage and the chair in a large piece of rust red fabric. Nervous chatter filled the air.
‘I haven’t done this since I was at school myself,’ Margery announced.
‘And which naked men were you drawing then exactly?’ Derek laughed, his rheumy blue eyes twinkling mischievously. He was already sitting down because of his dodgy hip; Helena had lowered his easel to the correct height for him.
‘Not nudes,’ Margery scolded. ‘Honestly! I meant drawing anything at all… a vase… a flower… I can’t think.’
‘Well, I used to draw quite a bit back in the day,’ Derek said. ‘I wonder if I’ve lost the knack?’
‘I’m terrible at art,’ Dawn said. ‘It was my worst subject—’
‘There is no such thing as being terrible at art,’ Willow interrupted. ‘As I tell my students, art is a feeling, an act of creativity, the process is more important than the result.’
‘Sorry we’re late,’ Johnny and Nathalie had both walked in at the same moment.
Had they arrived together? Helena’s suspicions were immediately on alert.
God, she hoped and prayed not. Johnny could not be Nathalie’s mystery man.
She honestly didn’t know what she would do if he was.
She’d been worried enough when she’d met Giselle, but thankfully she’d spotted a wedding ring on her left hand, and her mind had been put to rest.
She felt better when, instead of following Nathalie, Johnny came straight over to her, kissed her on the cheek and gave her a hug. It was hopeless, now every time she saw him she had the same reaction inside her, like a bath bomb dropped into water.
‘You look beautiful,’ he said. ‘Is that another new dress? It really suits you.’
She felt herself blushing at the compliment, ‘Thanks, yes it is.’ She busied herself with her easel to disguise her flushed cheeks and offered to fetch him a beer.
She was wearing a coral maxi-dress and some gold dangly earrings, both of which were new. She was really enjoying her new journey exploring colour and developing her own sense of style once again. She realised she had completely lost her sense of self in the years with Noah.
He took his position at the easel next to her, asking Margery about her day and engaging Derek with some small talk about the cricket.
Nathalie was across the room, next to some of her friends from the kids’ school, all of whom seemed to have been topping themselves up with the free prosecco quite liberally and were already pink-cheeked and merry.
Willow handed around some putty rubbers and sticks of charcoal, before calling for silence. ‘It’s lovely to see so many of you,’ Willow said. ‘You should be proud of yourselves for turning up today. Remember, as the great Henri Matisse once said, “creativity takes courage.”’
Some nervous laughter scattered around the room.
‘We are going to be using charcoal today, and before our wonderful model begins to pose for us,’ Willow gestured at Malcolm, who smiled graciously, wearing a purple silk robe to match his hair, ‘I will demonstrate some simple techniques you may wish to experiment with.’
Willow showed them how to vary the thickness of the lines, how to crosshatch and blend, and how to turn the charcoal on its side to drag it across the parchment.
Once her demonstration was over, the class began.
Malcolm dropped his robe to the floor and strode confidently across the room, climbing up on to the stage and taking a seat on the chair.
Helena admired him for his total body confidence.
He looked completely at peace with himself, fixing his gaze at a spot on the wall behind her and leaning back comfortably in the chair, his privates on full display.
As Willow circulated the room, she gave pointers to her students – all of which seemed impossible to understand. ‘Begin with the breath of the pose. Trust the first mark, it knows more than you do. You want to draw not so much the thigh itself, more the idea of the thigh…’
Helena tried not to get the giggles at Nathalie’s mock-serious nodding along to the instructions.
She was not surprised to see that Johnny was a gifted artist, each stroke he made seemed to capture the precise angle of each limb.
A simple drag of charcoal across paper brought a shoulder, a hand, a wrist into three dimensions.
No matter how hard she tried, Helena’s drawing looked more like the stick men she had watched Raffy draw over the years.
Willow stood behind her, nodding thoughtfully at her drawing.
‘Yes, very brave. Very brave indeed. Draw through the form, as if you can see the bones remembering themselves.’ Helena smiled as Johnny caught her eye.
She found more and more often that they knew what each other were thinking without the need to speak.
She was surprised at just how much she was enjoying herself.
It was fun to do something so different.
Willow was now by Margery’s side, squinting through her lashes as she examined her drawing, before asking her to imagine the spine as a question the body was asking.
The advice continued along these lines for the duration of the hour until the session drew to a close.
‘We must thank our model, Malcolm, for being such a fabulous subject,’ Willow said as everyone whooped and cheered him.
‘You are most welcome,’ he said, before standing up and giving a small bow, then walking back over to retrieve his robe and have a stretch.
When everyone had left and Helena had finished tidying up, she was unsurprised to hear a knock at the door. She had found Malcolm’s phone on the bookshelf, encased in a cover bearing the words, “Your fate is written in the stars”.
As he pushed it open he said, ‘I’ve left—’
‘Your phone?’ Helena finished his sentence, holding it out for him. ‘I thought you’d be back!’
He took it gratefully, ‘As much as I hate technology – I couldn’t live without the bloody thing!’ He chuckled, and she thought not for the first time how much she liked him. She knew her mother would have loved him too.
‘Thanks again for this evening,’ she smiled, slinging her bag over her shoulder and following him to the door.
‘It was fun,’ he said, holding it open for her.
They stepped out into the warm evening, filled with the smell of lavender from the plants on either side of the door. She paused as she turned her key in the lock. ‘Malcolm?’ she asked.
He turned back to face her. ‘Yes?’
‘Do you believe it? That your fate is written in the stars?’
‘I don’t believe it. I know it. Why do you ask?’
‘A psychic once told me I would meet a man, have a curly haired child. And I did, it was Raffy… and Noah. I just wondered… was that my lot, I suppose… or whether there might be more to come?’
He walked over to her and took her hand in his. He looked at her pensively, scanning her eyes as if reading a hidden text inscribed within. She held her breath, suddenly unsure if she wanted the answer.
Then his face cracked into a broad smile, as if a sun beam had just shot through a gap in the clouds. ‘Oh my dear, your journey in love has barely begun.’
*
Helena smiled to herself as she walked home through the village, watching a flock of birds soar in perfect synchronicity above her in the twilight.
She hoped Malcolm was right. She replayed the art class in her mind, already planning the next workshop, chuckling at Willow’s philosophical approach to teaching.
She wondered how much her students got out of her lessons.
Margery had been invited over to Derek’s for dinner after the class.
He was trying out the fajita recipe he had been taught at Helena’s cookery class the previous Wednesday afternoon.
It was the third recipe he had learned in what had proved to be one of the Community Café’s most popular workshops to date.
As Helena had suspected, Margery had started to refer to Derek as her boyfriend, which made Helena practically burst with happiness.
To see the new-found lease of life in them both, the companionship they were able to offer each other, it was so wonderful.
Two lonely souls had been brought together, thanks to the Community Café.
If it achieved nothing more, that alone would have been reward enough for Helena.
Having eaten some leftovers, Helena sat in the garden, enjoying a glass of wine.
It was nine o’clock. She gazed up at the stars, twinkling valiantly against their velvet black backdrop.
She remembered camping with her father as a child, lying out on the grass and looking up at the night sky.
He had told her that in ancient times they believed the souls of the bravest warriors left their mark, piercing the celestial canopy as their souls entered the afterlife, leaving a hole for the bright light of heaven to shine through to the earth below.
She tried to expand her mind, to imagine all the galaxies and multiverses that lay out of sight.
It was beyond comprehension. It never ceased to amaze her, the sheer vastness of it all.
Perhaps her mother had been right, with our limited human perception we could only hope to understand the smallest fraction of the reality we found ourselves in.
Her phone beeped, dragging her awareness back down to earth.
Helena, sorry to disturb you. Would you be able to come over? It’s Raffy. I’m worried about him. He’s not well. I need your help… N x
As she read the words Helena’s heart jumped into her throat.
What could have happened? One thing was for sure, it must be bad for Noah to reach out like this.
He hadn’t asked her for anything in all the time since he had been back.
Perhaps he had one of those insanely high temperatures again?
He often used to get them, dangerously high, they would come on suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere.
When he was little, he had sometimes suffered from fits, terrifyingly violent episodes of shaking and convulsions, his eyes rolling to the back of his head.
Flushed with adrenaline, without stopping to think, she typed her reply:
On my way.