Rachel had always wanted to draw, to become an accomplished painter. It was a dream she’d held from being a very young child and, after all, George was dead and Edward had left home, so she was free to do whatever she liked, but she hated the fact that most people in the class were not there to paint, or recreate the world in the way they saw it, but to pass a bit of time, have some company. She stuck it out for three Wednesday afternoons and then never went back. She saw her teacher one day while she was sitting in the gallery.
‘We missed you. You were my best pupil.’
Rachel had grimaced and told her, ‘That wasn’t saying a lot, was it?’
The woman had laughed and asked her to explain.
‘I came to paint,’ Rachel explained. ‘To be part of the excitement, and what I got was the reek of boredom. People just dabbling into something as a way of passing time, not because they had a passion for it.’
‘And is that so wrong?’ The woman had asked.
Rachel shrugged, ‘Maybe not, unless you’re looking for lost dreams.’
‘How about coming to my life class, then? That’s a totally different experience.’
‘I think not. I really wanted to do landscapes, but you know, maybe I should have just left it as a dream. It felt like visiting a place you’d held dear in your memory for so long, to find that going back destroyed the image. Yes, I should have left it as a dream.’
‘I don’t suppose you’d consider modelling for us, would you?’
Rachel could absorb the atmosphere around her without having to become a part of it. All eyes were on her. At first it seemed strange, but then she began to take a pride in it and over the years she became a regular fixture, someone the tutors talked to with respect, and yes, there were those who desired her too. Those who, from the look in their eyes, wanted to do more than just draw her body.
Rachel had always been attracted to men who desired her. One boy had followed her home and stood at her gate in the falling dusk. She’d gone upstairs, turned on her bedroom light and undressed for him, turning around in the window so that he could see her silhouetted shape. When she looked out again he was gone. He didn’t come to class for two weeks. When he returned she slipped him a note, invited him to tea without giving her address.
He came one Sunday afternoon, tongue-tied, with no flowers. She asked him if he had ever had sex. He shook his head and reddened. He stood up to go. She asked him if he would like to have sex with an older woman. Then he’d looked at her, and said she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and that he’d dreamed all day of stroking the soft, white, dimpled flesh of her inner thigh. She took him; not upstairs in her bed, but out of the house and round the back, down the steps and into the gentle, must smell of the cellar, where George’s workbench with all his tools were still arranged as neatly as he had left them the weekend before he died.
There were others after him; a lecturer, shabby, bored and waiting for his retirement. She didn’t take him home. The boy was her only special one. He would seek her out at the oddest of times. She would hear a soft tap on her door and know by the timidity of the knock that it was him. She would shut the front door behind them and take him around the back of the house and down the cellar steps. As his confidence grew, he visited less often; spending more time with people of his own age. She had loved the passing secrecy of it, even though she no longer had to keep these things from George.