Reaching for a fresh piece of paper, she started work on the model. She knew before she started that the foreshortening of the pose was beyond her, but still she scraped away until, after forty minutes of dibbling and dabbling about, she sat back and contemplated her work.
‘God, that’s awful,’ she said, shocked into speaking aloud.
‘Hmm. Certainly isn’t your best.’
She hadn’t heard him approach. He bent forward, his sleeve a black wing brushing her face, and picked up the drawing. But in so doing he revealed the portrait of himself underneath.
She waited for the explosion of anger, one of his rare, white-lipped rages that she’d heard about but never witnessed.
Instead, he burst out laughing. ‘Really, Miss Brooke, you flatter me.’
Without further comment, he took her drawing of the model and began making quick, anatomical sketches in the margin, each of them better than anything she’d managed to achieve. Tonks’s skeletons had more life than her nudes. She tried to concentrate on what he was saying, but it was hopeless: she was too aware of whispers spreading round the room. By the end of the session, everybody knew what she’d done.
No sooner had Tonks left the room than her friends clustered round her. ‘Oh, Elinor, you didn’t.’ ‘What did he say?’ ‘Come on, let’s see it.’ ‘Don’t be such a spoilsport.’ Finally, a gasp of sheer horror: ‘It wasn’t nude, was it?’
She escaped as soon as she could. Outside the quad gates, she hesitated. If she went back to her lodgings now, she might well spend the rest of the day in bed with the covers pulled over her head. No, somehow or other, she had to keep going, and she had to get away from the Slade.
Russell Square was the nearest green space. She often came here, though not usually at lunchtime. The benches were crowded with people eating soggy sandwiches from greaseproof-paper bags. She found herself a place on the grass and lay down, lifting her face to the sun. Somewhere near by a fountain played, though the sound of trickling water brought no relief. God, it was hot. She could barely swallow, her throat was so dry. At the far end of the square was a hut with a few tables outside, where you could buy lemonade, but there was a long queue. Not worth it, she decided. Not in this heat.
Thoughts floated to the surface of her mind and burst like bubbles. I should have brought a drawing pad. You never really felt alone if you were drawing; it formed a sort of cocoon around you. And why didn’t I wear a thinner dress? That queue’s quite a bit shorter now. And why, why, wasn’t she wearing a straw hat? She had one — well, it was there somewhere — only that morning she’d been in such a state she’d grabbed the first thing she could lay her hands on. Black felt, oh God, far too hot in this weather, although at least she could pull it down and hide her cropped hair. But now her scalp itched. A bead of sweat ran down into her eye, burning like acid, and suddenly it was all too much. She tore the hat off, leaned forward and shook her fingers through her hair.
At the same moment, a shadow fell across her. Peering up through the mess of jagged ends, she saw Kit Neville, in a baggy, creased suit, looking down at her.
‘Miss Brooke, you look rather hot, I wonder if you’d like some lemonade?’
‘There’s a queue.’
‘It’s not so bad now. Shall I get us some?’
She nodded, trying to think of something slightly more gracious to say, but he’d already turned away. He’d startled her, appearing in front of her so suddenly. When he vanished behind a clump of bushes, she was half inclined to think he’d been a mirage, but no, minutes later, there he was again, his burly figure making great strides across the grass, a ragged shadow snatching at his heels.
He handed her a glass. ‘Don’t know how cool it is, mind.’
Cautiously, with an audible clicking of the knees, he lowered himself to sit beside her, risking grass stains on his obviously expensive suit. That was one of the things you noticed about Kit Neville. He wore extremely well-tailored suits, and he looked a mess. She didn’t particularly like the man — or, rather, she didn’t like what she’d heard about him. He was a bully, people said. But now, looking at him, she saw none of the swaggering self-confidence he projected so expertly at the Slade. He seemed, if anything, distinctly shy, afraid of rejection.
He took a sip of lemonade. ‘Ugh! Warm.’
‘Least it’s wet. And thank you for getting it, I just couldn’t face the queue.’
They drank in silence for a moment. Then: ‘Are you going back to college?’ he asked. ‘Only if you’re not, we could go on the river.’
The idea of playing truant for the whole afternoon shocked her. ‘No, I’ve got to get back.’
He was tempted to skip the men’s life class, he said. Couldn’t face another dose of Tonks. He seemed to have developed almost a feud with Tonks, whose excoriating comments on his work were passed from mouth to mouth, losing nothing in the repetition. ‘Did you hear what Tonks said to Neville?’ ‘Oh, he didn’t, did he?’ ‘I think if anybody said that to me, I’d leave.’ Suddenly, it all seemed rather immature to Elinor: the relish, the furtive excitement, children wetting themselves with glee because somebody else was in trouble. She had been guilty of it herself, more than once, but she wouldn’t do it again, because, in the length of time it took to drink a glass of lemonade, Kit had become a friend.
Getting up was difficult. She’d got pins and needles from sitting in the same position too long; she rested a hand, briefly, on his arm to steady herself and caught a glance of such open admiration that she blushed. He’d made no comment on her hair, but he hadn’t taken his eyes off it either. Perhaps short hair wasn’t such a disaster, after all.
They walked back to the Slade together. At the entrance to the quad, they paused. Groups of art students were chatting in circles on the grass, while on the steps of the medical school rows of young men were lined up side by side, looking, in their black suits, like swallows waiting to migrate.
‘Perhaps we should go in separately?’ he said. Male and female students were not supposed to mix.
‘No, I think we should have the courage of our convictions.’
She took his arm and, conscious of heads turning to follow them, they marched across the lawn, through the double doors and into the entrance hall, where a single glance from a disapproving receptionist was enough to make them collapse into giggles.
Suddenly serious, Kit said, ‘I enjoyed that. I hope we can do it again.’
‘Yes, I hope so too.’
They parted at the foot of the stairs. The last hour seemed extraordinary to Elinor, though they’d done nothing special. Only, for those few minutes, in spite of everything, she’d been happy.
Every afternoon, when Elinor left the Slade, she looked up at the steps of the medical school, half expecting to see Toby there, waiting for her, as he so often had in the past; but it was a week before she saw him again, and then he came to her lodgings.
She was sitting at her dressing table, getting ready to go out, when she heard footsteps running up the last — uncarpeted — flight of stairs. The door was unlocked. Toby called to her from the living room, briefly darkened the bedroom doorway, and came to stand behind her. She didn’t turn round, merely looked at his reflection in the glass.