Ivy Wiseman (her maiden name; Schneider when married) had three or four jobs on the go at any given time. She was also a very part-time student at the art college on a foundation course which had so far lasted five years. That’s what saved me, she told Rachel. Going back to the beginning of something, that, and work. Who cares about the hours? There’s still plenty left, and I don’t want anyone else’s money. I pay my own rent.
Somewhere in between a day shift, a modelling session and a night shift, Ivy arrived with her refugee bundle of belongings at Rachel’s flat. She was not a stranger to it; she had stayed overnight, but this felt permanent. She had a single, but huge, bulging gingham bag of clothes and shoes, a folio case in pink plastic, a mobile phone, and that was all. Not much to show for my years, she laughed
On Tuesday evening Rachel faced her own father, who disapproved, as he would. He was a small, grey widower who came up once a month to check his daughter was all right. Unless he could do something practical and useful, he liked to keep these visits brief, in case it looked as if he was interfering in her life. He was proud of his daughter, but constantly worried about her financial security, especially since she had changed her job. He suspected extravagance and held debt in horror. After two redundancies, prudence was his own personal God and anxiety his constant companion, which all served to make him awkward when sitting in her London flat, perched on the edge of the armchair as if afraid to sit back into it. Rachel’s father never looked as if he belonged, and always seemed anxious to leave, as if the distance between himself and his own home, a mere commuter train ride away, was really a thousand miles and he needed to get back before his retreat into safety became impossible.
Rachel was still tingling from the sensations of the weekend before, anchored in her mind as being mainly sunshine, laughter, fascination and a longing to go back there as soon as possible, to somewhere which already felt like home. She had daydreamed through Monday, almost forgotten the meeting with her father and knew it showed. It was wrong to compare parents with other parents, but she could not avoid it. Ivy’s were glamorous; her own was not.
‘Everything all right, Dad?’
‘Yes, yes, perfectly all right.’
‘All right’ was the height of his ambition. Anything better than ‘OK’ would alarm him. She could not admit to either happiness or sadness with him, nor he with her. Whenever Rachel met her father, she felt as if she was letting him down by failing to give him something to do. And failing to understand him. She loved him helplessly, worried for him, always expected it to be different, but it never was. He would never allow himself to be spoiled. Shall we go to a show, Dad? Eat Italian?
What for?
He would never ask for anything. He despised spongers, believed you should work yourself out of your own messes, never borrowing, lending or begging. His wife had been the centre of his universe, and their tiny house in Luton was a temple to the art of do-it-yourself, through which all love was expressed. The children of parents in love are often orphans. Rachel hated every brick of it.
They talked on parallel lines, the way they always did, with nothing much to say. She could hear Grace’s full-bellied laughter echo in her mind, and wished that she and her father could hug one another like that.
‘How are you really, Dad?’
‘Mustn’t complain.’
‘What’ve you been doing?’
‘Not a lot. What about you?’
The joys of London life left him cold; the wonders of Sky TV and shopping on eBay had a similar effect on her. Not much to say, really. At least, this time, she could tell him about the farm. That way they could postpone irritating each other, if it was not already too late. She looked at her watch. Time for class. He would respect that.
‘I don’t like you sharing this place,’ he said. ‘But I suppose it’ll help with the mortgage. You don’t want a freeloader.’
In his eyes, the world was full of freeloading thieves. People who promised security, and then took it away.
‘No, Dad, it won’t help with the mortgage. She’s no money. Anyway, I was telling you about this brilliant weekend with her parents. They’ve got a farm, with a lake … well, the lake’s not theirs, but it’s there.’
‘Oh good, they must be worth a bob or two then.’
Rachel gritted her teeth. ‘Doesn’t follow, Dad. Only if they sold it. Not otherwise.’
‘Can’t see you on a farm. Did they get you milking cows?’
‘They get milked by machine.’
There was a glimmer of interest in that. He forgot to look at the time and finger the train timetable in his pocket along with his medications.
‘Oh, do they now?’
‘Yes. And it’s all on computer. They each have a number round their neck. There was one that was blind, poor thing. They’re probably going to have to get rid of that, because it won’t calve. They all plod into this milking parlour, like they’re on autopilot, and when you see how much milk they’ve got to get rid of, you can see why they’re pleased to be there. The weight of it! Then they’re plugged in. Three hours a time, it takes, every drop measured. Then they plod out, and go and eat more hay. Silage, mixed with stuff. Molasses. It smells wonderful. I couldn’t believe how technical it is. The milking side of it, I mean. The rest is sweated labour. Moving tons of straw and food. They seem to eat their own weight, every day.’
Rachel did not mention that standing in the well of the milking parlour with the penned beasts surrounding her had almost made her sick. They stood level with her head, while Ernest demonstrated how the suckers he fixed to the teats of those enormous udders actually worked. They don’t pull, or suck, see? They just exert a little pressure. He had made her put her finger into one; it squeezed, slightly. The atmosphere was thick with the smell of milk, shit and, most of all, the sweet, fetid breath of the beasts themselves as they looked at her with intense curiosity, and she tried not to shrink from their monstrous size.
They were huge, soft machines themselves, with sharp spines and helpless faces. They trod in their own faeces. They needed a barn as big as a church. They tried to ride each other when they were in heat. They were that stupid. And strangely, vulnerably lovely.
‘I didn’t see the pigs. I’ll see them next time. I saw the fields. He grows grass for the cows, and he’s giving up on growing wheat. Except it’s useful if the hay runs out. He can cut the wheat when it’s green, and add it to the silage.’
Too much information. Rachel’s father adored technicalities; details of the construction of the barn and what it was made of would have kept him there, but enough was enough. He looked at his watch.
‘I’d best be off. And you to your evening class, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘I’ve heard farms are dangerous places,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to be going back.’
Don’t rise to it. Rachel helped him into his coat. Always a coat, even in a heat wave. Always wearing too many clothes. The coat was the equivalent of a handbag, but he would never have carried a bag. His pockets jangled with his inhaler for chronic, controlled asthma, his tranquillisers, the acid stabilisers he took like sweets for his suspect ulcer; he had the illnesses of a worrier, the stoop of a labourer and a whole raft of prejudices. She looked round her flat as they left. What a colourless place it was. A good buy; he had approved of it. Her father turned at the door.
‘You want to be careful about sharing this place, you know. It’s difficult to get people out. You don’t want to risk it.’
She felt an overwhelming rush of irritation then. Enough to make her want to shout at him. She wanted to scream because she could not make him happy, but all the same, like every other time, when she waved him goodbye and watched him descend into the bowels of the underground, she wanted to cry. He looked so small, so free of any enchantment.
I want to meet your friend, he said. You should have kept that man of yours, you need someone to look after you.
No, Rachel thought. It’s the other way round. I am your child, a child of the Thatcher era, bred to succeed, to own property, to wed myself to a career and not look left or right. Exactly as my untrained, factory-working father, traumatised by two redundancies, wanted for me. The pride of prosperity, the solidity of a good, professional job, and the safety of a qualification. Master, not servant. And now he worries in case he got it all wrong. He’s not the only one.
She was walking fast, aware that her step was light, and her face was turned to the sun. After the weekend at Midwinter Farm, she was always looking towards the sun, dreaming of it. The farm, and the promise of the farm, was only the last of a long line of gifts from Ivy.
London was sweaty inside, dry out. Looking out of the dusty window as the bus lumbered down Oxford Street, she reflected, not for the first time, that the London she inhabited was so very different from the one Ivy knew. Rachel’s was high-rise, glass-fronted buildings, computer screens, takeover bids, carpeted floors, civilised meals out and microwaved meals indoors. She was highly focused, driven, the city just a place to work, admired from a taxi. Ivy’s was sleazy bars for cheap booze, a series of more or less dirty jobs to fund survival and an art course which had run on for years, with her cash payments never quite enough, her homes a series of squats rising to the tiny basement room she had just relinquished, her employment status that of a reformed heroin addict, and her instincts those of the streetwise, homeless beggar she had also been. Ivy knew hostels for the dispossessed and the temperature of cold pavements. Washed up at thirty, that had been Ivy. Once upon a time, Rachel would have walked round her and left her there, if she had even noticed her.
Rachel walked into the Institute and nodded a greeting to the man on the door. She loved the contrast this place made with the tidiness of the rest of her existence. There were no uniforms, such as suits, no social code, no rules, no pretensions; you were whatever you wanted to be. No one noticed or cared; no one remembered your name or questioned why you were there, but simply accepted you were. She went down the corridor, through the swing doors which bore the scuff marks of a thousand kicking feet, into the alleyway, left past the lockers and into the studio where the life drawing class was held. Strange how quickly this anarchic place, so unlike a sanitised office, had become part of her life. It was gloriously scruffy, like her first, beloved primary school, and Rachel had always loved school. Perhaps that was why she breathed the musty air with pleasure and blinked in the bright, artificial light. It was hotter than a hospital ward, hotter than outside. Models without clothes needed heat. This was where Rachel had met Ivy.
‘Hi. Warm in here, isn’t it? Who do you think we’ll get today?’
Somebody else was early, putting out chairs, teacher’s pet. The only awkward student, the Plonker. Norman. The only one with a less than intellectual interest in the unclothed female form. You get them, Ivy said cheerfully. One weird man per dozen.
Rachel had gone to the life drawing class originally because it was available, because she had needed something radically different to do, and because she wanted to learn how to look. She had known she had been naïve; she wanted to learn how to observe. It was more than an attempt to fill a gap; it had a purpose. At the time she had been assiduous, organised, and utterly hollow. Her mother was three years dead, her lover of a decade had gone. She was an earmarked stranger in a new job where she was suspected, but no nervous breakdowns were allowed. You filled blank time and cried in private, that was what you did. You distracted your awful, inconvenient conscience by doing something which demanded total concentration, especially if it offered a warm room filled with other people on a cold winter night and the chance to learn something missing from a streamlined education. Besides, it was essentially pointless in career terms, and that, too, was deliberate. Every other course had led somewhere; this didn’t and no one would judge her success or failure. It was a private process. She could justify the time by saying there were terrible gaps in her cultural knowledge; observation had never been a strong point. And then, after lesson three, she was hooked. Something about the science of drawing began to make sense. You had to learn with your eyes. The hand from wrist to fingertip is usually the same length as the face from chin to hairline. Only a small part of the head is the face, leave space for the rest. You must get the essentials on the page, otherwise you run out of space. LOOK. Measure, if you will. Feet are enormous, beautiful things, and hands are obscure; everything is curves and angles, nothing is straight. Her own hand began to move against her will. The models fascinated her, made her understand how much personality a human being could express without saying a word. How much we give away, express or withhold while simply staying still, without the disguise of clothes or speech.
The room was shrouded in a cloak of dust, with a paint-stained podium in the centre and a mess of plastic chairs and easels lying against the walls. The hum of bus traffic permeated through the frosted windows. The room bore the paint splashes and charcoal residues of countless experiments. There was a sink and a waste bin and a row of hooks, the accumulated rubbish of old work. The life model had a cubicle in the corner in which to change. From it, Ivy had emerged in all her glory. Week six, that was. Bolder than brass, fluid as water. Giving and grinning. A lined face, a thatch of hair, a long, lean body with pendulous breasts, giving off a great big heady cloud of life and the soles of her enormous feet already grey with dust from stepping across the room.
Four short poses, two long poses, and then there was an interval after an hour. Most models rested, sat in dressing gowns and chewed. Not Ivy. Ivy perambulated in a raggy T-shirt. Rachel was always anxious about the models. Were they warm enough? Were they treated with respect? Who would do this for a pittance an hour? It beats the shit out of waitressing, Ivy told her later, it helps pay for the course. It’s not as good a rate as cleaning on the night shifts, though, but it’s OK, it’s fine.
Ivy used the interval time to swig tea and talk. So what do I look like, then? she said. You tell me, I don’t know. She laughed with them, teased them, created chatter in a normally silent, serious group. Rachel had seen her out of the corner of her eye, pulling up alongside, stopping like a bus when someone has flagged it down. She had stood, and stared.
‘Good God,’ she said. ‘I could be looking in a mirror. You’ve got me. You’ve really got me.’
I had, too, Rachel thought. I was having a good day and Ivy inspired me. I forgot my passion for detail, went for the broader strokes, made quick decisions. I was freed by her. Ivy had been standing in a classic pose half turned towards where Rachel sat, looking over her shoulder, one arm clasping her waist. Rachel had drawn a long, lithe animal, pausing before flight or fight. She had even sketched in the suggestion of a tail.
Ivy laughed, a gorgeous sound in the dusty room more used to murmurs and the forgotten hum of the road outside. Then she took Rachel’s pencil and sketched in a pair of ears for herself.
‘Could be a cat,’ she said. ‘Or a skunk. Anyway, it’s me.’ She bent towards Rachel, and whispered in her ear.
‘Better than that idiot over there. Pity I was facing him. He goes to other classes too, and never gets further than my tits.’
Today, Rachel glanced across the room where the dust dazed and settled, and sharpened her pencils and thought of the moment when she had felt so flattered by a sense of achievement and Ivy’s praise.
‘I think you’re the one person in the room who ought to persist,’ Ivy said. ‘You’ve really got me. No one else has. That means you’ve got a piece of me, for ever.’
At the end of the session Ivy waited, Rachel waited. They went out for a drink which turned into many. Laughed themselves sick. Arranged to meet again, and the rest was history. Rachel adjusted the sketchbook, propped it on the plastic easel, and opened it, turning the page back carefully. She could not resist being careful with paper, although in the intervening months she had become relatively careless with everything else. She was breaking the habits of a lifetime.
Waiting for the model to take the stand, Rachel found herself wondering what her father would have done if he had found himself with a daughter like Ivy. What it must have been like for Ivy’s parents to stand by and watch while she drove her own life over a cliff, and then clawed her way back. They were proud of her. They had learned not to be overtly protective. They were right to be proud; Ivy had done braver things in her life than Rachel ever had. Dispelled demons Rachel had never had to acknowledge.
Emerged like sunshine on a rainy day. Generous and strong, still fighting.
‘It was me who screwed up,’ Ivy had said. ‘And me who had to unscrew it. If I’d taken help, it wouldn’t be the same. And I did have help. I always knew I could go home. Now I can. I’m thirty-nine. I’ll get to the end of this blasted course, and then maybe even my son will want to know me.’
Five years on a foundation course which should have taken two. Ivy was an art school fixture, who haunted the place. Ivy was a cleaner. She cleaned offices and shops and theatres and clubs.
She did not look thirty-nine. She looked eighteen, apart from her older, wiser, watchful, mischievous face.
There would be no Ivy in this week’s life drawing class, although she was a regular round several venues. The models varied in sex and age; they needed to see different bodies, different proportions in order to learn, but all the same, there had come to be a sense of communal disappointment when it was someone else’s, because Ivy’s spirit lifted them all. The man Rachel and Ivy called the Plonker, the one who attempted to confine his drawing to bosoms and genitals whenever the teacher was not watching, drew his chair nearer to Rachel’s, so that she could almost smell his breath. There was always someone who wanted to be too close.
‘I wish we could have Ivy all the time,’ he whispered to her. ‘She grows on you, you know. I do the Saturday class too. She followed me halfway home, you know. Think I’m in with a chance?’
Rachel ignored him and the peppermint smell of his breath, bent to the task. She was all fingers and thumbs today. Would Ivy be home later?
‘We’ll begin as usual with the quick poses. Three minutes only. Remember, get down the essentials.’
Today’s model had coffee skin and a black scrotum, a yoga-honed body and a sense of mischief, using modelling as a form of exercise. Ivy could have trained him in attitude. You have to have a degree of confidence to do this, Ivy said. You have to give something. And you can play tricks when you’re bored.
Slowly and deliberately, the model stood on his head, cradling his skull in his hands, everything pointing down, and held the position.
The class collapsed into giggles and then into howls of laughter.
I must tell Ivy, Rachel thought, Ivy would love this. Ivy would be home soon.
There were a fleet of them who descended on the building at eight o’clock. They gathered in the foyer, some arriving on foot, some waiting, some disgorged from a van with the supervisor who counted them in and counted them out and showed the newcomers where things were. All doors were open to them, all secrets revealed if they knew where to look. The aim was to be in and out as fast as possible and on to the next. There was the six-to-eight shift, the eight-to-ten, and the morning shifts. Most did either/or; some did all of them, committing themselves to a rolling timetable the week before. No show, no pay. There was an endless supply of them. There was the minimum opportunity for theft, and not much for camaraderie. Three people to each floor and a strict timetable. They advanced like tired foot soldiers. More like a herd of cattle, slow-footed and obedient.
The night cleaners had arrived.
They spread around the place like busy ants, fetching and carrying after the supervisor unlocked the cupboard doors. Machinery was released, rubber gloves donned. A large, grizzled black man joshed a bigger, broader Nigerian woman, under the gaze of an inscrutable Albanian. They were not a team, but they could behave as if they were. Jokes made the dirty business easier. A little revenge upon the inconsiderate was permitted, if not permissible. Curiosity about their environment was not a virtue and there was no time for it.
Most of them knew the building and went on to automatic pilot. They liked it for being relatively easy. Nothing old, nothing wooden, no areas which did not permit the ruthless application of short-cut chemicals, all done with a wipe. No hierarchy among them, no pecking order. Everyone had to do lavatories.
The woman with the scarf tied over her hair always hummed as she worked, inaudible over the whir of Hoovers and polishers. Polish on the shiny floors by the lifts could be an excuse for sabotage to anyone so inclined. Left half-done, someone might slip and break an ankle when he came out of the lift in the morning. Some of the people who worked here were no better than pigs. One of them littered the floor round his desk with the detritus of what he ate during the day. Chicken bones, soup, sticky crumbs, and his high-smelling spare shoes under the desk. Another left grubby gym kit over the back of his chair. The men who used the washrooms on this floor had very poor aim. Someone had wanked at his desk last week and dropped the tissues in the bin. Amazing what could be done in an open-plan office.
The floor spread, with its islands of desks, each accompanied by a pedestal drawer stand, easily shifted, for the tools of their trade and personal possessions. They could lock their little drawer in accordance with office policy, and they mostly did, but they could still leave traces of personality hanging like a cloud around their own little bit of space. The expression of a personality in its absence.
Here was a desk which deserved extra care. A nice tidy desk, with photos of children pinned to the barrier wall which separated it from the next, a well-watered flowering plant, and a box of sweets. No litter in the desk-side bin; a considerate desk. The cleaner cleaned the surfaces, and looked at the children. This woman had a top drawer full of household bills and divorce papers, poor cow.
The cleaner was on the wrong floor today. The next floor was off limits.
What did they do, all these punished people who worked in this silent place? A shelf of books at one end. Advertising, insurance, buying and selling, accounting, something, and who cared anyway? There was plenty of time for a quick worker to explore, but by eight thirty-five it was time to speed up. The supervisor was on his way upstairs, the lift whining, someone waiting to explain the bits they could not reach, the need for more equipment. Or things which needed special attention, such as a washroom flood. Not their problem.
The only problem on this floor was the man asleep at the last desk in the far corner, on the left. Out for the count. A big, fat, ugly brute, with a belly distending his shirt as he sprawled on a swivel chair, trousers mercifully zipped, head lolled into stillness, one arm resting on the desk, with his fingers next to a pint glass of water. Gone out for a drink or seven at five, slipped back into the building. Fallen asleep. His desk was sticky; he had fetched the water while he could stand, been sick in the bin, would wake with a raging thirst. All that was predictable.
The cleaner held the plastic container of clear bleach in one hand. It was the unnamed brand they used in the lavatories, more powerful than the milder antiseptic spray used for other surfaces. What they used on the stained porcelain was not available in the supermarket. Pure poison was quicker.
Pour out the water in the full glass, top it up with bleach, swirl it around a bit, and leave it for him. Easy. He was a loser. Revenge of a sort, could not be easier. Three minutes to go.
Then she saw that his cheeks, lined into grooves of exhaustion, were still wet with tears. Salt crusted his eyelids.
She drew back.
Not even for practice. No matter how miserable he was. It was too much like killing a dumb animal.
Do it anyway.
At eight thirty, the klaxon sounded in the Institute which housed the evening life class, and the model stepped down off the podium with relief. Reprimanded for the headstand joke, he had become subdued.
Unlike Norman, who sat next to Rachel. A sad-looking man, when she troubled to notice, always seeking attention. A fidget, when the model was male.
‘Fancy a drink?’ he asked her.
There were ten women and fifteen men in this class. Rachel reckoned the Plonker had probably asked the same question of all the women and certainly some of the models. He had the contagion of loneliness. She was sure her response was the same as all the others.
‘No time, thanks. Got to rush.’
Then she was sorry for him. She knew about rejection. The sorrow had faded to anger by the time she reached the top of the road and waited to cross. It was still bright summer light, the evening crowds waning, settling in to their entertainments. She wanted to be home, and there he was behind, following her, waving. Then he was not pitiable; he was a nuisance. A lone figure in the playground of central London. Rachel began to run.
Her flat seemed ultra-quiet, as well as bland, when she reached it. On the bus she had longed for the sensation of going home and finding someone there. Once indoors, she went to the phone and called Ivy. Ivy wore her mobile in a pouch on a leather necklace at all times. Even when she stripped to model, it was the last thing she took off.
‘Hi! Are you coming home?’
‘In a while. Mopping up here. How was the class?’
‘He stood on his head!’
‘Good,’ Ivy said, laughing with Grace’s laugh. ‘Good boy. Good, good, good. We’re going to learn how to do that.’