‘You do see life, don’t you, Ros? Whereas I’m just a humble and anonymous artist’s model, condemned to pose forever in a freezing garret.’ Kate pouted extravagantly and crossed her arms over her breasts modestly beneath the blanket.
‘In a well-heated modern studio, you mean! With someone who is stretching every nerve to make you immortal.’ Ros ran her hand through Kate’s hair, feeling the familiar wiry strength beneath the softness that she so relished. She felt the stirrings of desire as she caressed the nape of her partner’s neck, then said sternly, ‘Back to work, you idle serf. Get thee to the chaise longue and distribute thyself in the approved manner.’
Kate Merrick fled in her own simulation of abject terror, then without apparent effort set her limbs into the exact pose she had left twenty minutes earlier, with her left arm over the rise of the chaise longue, her back to the artist, and her eyes looking not directly at the easel but at the ceiling above her. Once there, she sighed extravagantly and said thoughtfully, ‘I should think Peter Preston could willingly murder your Mrs Dooks.’
FOUR
Sam Hilton would have been reassured to know that Ros Barker thought so kindly of him. However, the knowledge probably wouldn’t have affected the action he was now taking.
He heard the phone shrilling at the other end of the line and was surprised how his pulse quickened at the sound. Then the receiver was picked up and the authoritative voice he had expected said simply, ‘Marjorie Dooks.’
‘Er, good morning, Mrs Dooks. It’s — it’s Sam Hilton here. The poet. I’m on your literary festival committee.’
An indeterminate sound. Whether it was a stifled giggle or a grunt of exasperation or something else entirely, he couldn’t be certain. ‘Yes, Sam. I know who you are. What can I do for you?’
‘Well, nothing really. I just wanted to tell you something.’ Sam decided he hated phones, but held the small mobile more tightly against his ear.
‘And what would that something be, Sam?’
Marjorie was trying to be encouraging, but she came through to Sam as a woman near the edge of her patience. ‘I want to resign.’
There. He had blurted it out, when he had meant to give his reasons and emphasize how entirely logical the action was. The damned woman had this effect upon him, for some reason, when he should have just despised her and everything she stood for. He wanted to explain himself, when he should have just said, ‘I’m going. Peter bloody Preston and the rest of you can just piss off if you don’t like it.’ But they would like it, of course. They might bleat a bit about it for form’s sake, but secretly they’d be damned glad to see the back of him and everything he represented.
‘It would be a pity if you felt you had to leave us, Sam. Speaking personally and selfishly, it would make my job a lot more difficult.’
He tried to be aggressive. ‘I should have thought it would have made it a damned sight easier. You could plan what you want to do without having any awkward fucking youngsters to get in the way.’
‘But we need awkward fucking youngsters. And you’re the only one we’ve got, Sam.’
He’d tried to shock her and she’d come straight back at him with the word, as if she used it all the time. He had meant to throw her off balance and now he was thrown himself. He said desperately, ‘I’m twenty-two and I’m the only young bugger on that committee. Half the time I’m not even sure what you’re fucking talking about.’
‘I’m sure that’s not true, Sam. And Ros Barker’s only thirty, you know. That may seem old to you, but to people like Christine Lambert and me, she’s much more in your age-group than ours.’
‘Mrs Lambert taught me.’ Why had he said that? It had been out before he knew he was going to say it. It sounded like a confession of weakness. ‘It’s the first time I can remember enjoying a poem.’
‘That’s interesting. I didn’t know that. What age were you then, Sam?’
He wished she wouldn’t keep using his name. Even though he wanted to sneer at her, he knew that he couldn’t call her Marjorie. ‘I was about ten, I suppose. It was my last year in junior school.’
‘You owe her a lot, then. She helped to set you on the lonely road to becoming a poet.’
Despite himself, he liked that word ‘lonely’. It made her sound almost as though she knew what it was like to spend hours on your own wrestling with words, battering your mind to come up with the phrase that you and only you could produce. Before he could stop himself, he heard himself quoting,
‘“Quinquereme of Ninevah from distant Ophir, Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine.” I can’t remember what quinquereme is. Some sort of Roman galley, I think. I just liked the sound of the words. They’re from Cargoes by John Masefield. No one reads him now.’
‘More’s the pity if they don’t,’ said Marjorie staunchly. ‘“Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack, Butting through the Channel in the mad March days.” That poem must have made an impression on me as well, Sam.’
‘You know it!’ He couldn’t keep the delight out of his voice, when delight was the last thing he had planned.
‘I haven’t thought about it for years. But we learned things by heart, in the prehistoric days when I went to school. Actually, that was out of date even then, but I went to an old-fashioned private prep school. I’ve been getting rid of lots of the stuff they taught me ever since, but I’m glad we learned a bit of poetry.’
‘It’s full of rhythm, you know, that poem. You have to have rhythm, whatever sort of verse you’re writing. Even free verse has to have some sort of rhythm.’ He was preaching at her, the way he preached at his poetry-reading gigs, when people asked him about verse and why what they tried to write didn’t satisfy them. She’d probably choke him off now, which would be a good thing. He could get on with resigning and telling her to piss off, if the damned woman would only behave as she was supposed to.
But the damned woman said, ‘That’s why we need you, Sam, you see. I don’t think there’s anyone else in the group who understands properly what poetry is all about.’
He said sullenly, ‘People round here don’t want to listen to people like me.’
She went on almost as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘We need you to hold your corner against all this cosy middle-class satisfaction and give us access to people like Bob Crompton. I’m sure he’ll be like a breath of fresh air for us. And stuffy old Oldford needs a breath of fresh air, don’t you think?’
‘I suppose so.’ He hoped he was just agreeing to the breath of fresh air and not to staying on her damned committee. He’d meant this to be short, sweet and vulgar, but the bloody woman seemed able to take all his shots and not even realize she was under fire. He said, ‘I’m no good at committees. I’ve never been on one before.’
‘And I’ve been on far too many. They’re a bore for a lot of the time, but they’re the only way of reaching decisions when you have a group of people with different backgrounds and different opinions. We want all of them to be represented — it’s one of the differences between fascism and democracy.’ Marjorie wondered if ‘fascism’ was still the all-embracing, demonizing word it had been in her youth. Sam Hilton would have been amazed as well as consoled if he had known how hard his ogress was struggling with her own end of the conversation.
‘Anyway, that’s why I’ve decided that it’s not for me.’
‘I’d miss you if you did go, you know, Sam. Between you and me, I’m not sure I could hold out against the scorn of people like Peter Preston if you weren’t there to express a different point of view.’
‘I can’t fucking stand him.’ He was surprised how much relief it brought him to be able to speak with real venom.
‘Peter has his uses and his contacts. And, believe it or not, he has experience none of the rest of us has. There’ll be times when we need to listen to his opinions. All points of view should be represented, as I said. Including yours, Sam.’