Limestone and Clay (7 page)

From the window, she watches Iris on her way out. It is raining slightly. She watches her hesitate before deciding to put up her umbrella, a clear plastic one inside which her head and shoulders are a blur. Is she off to sell fortunes or Intrigue? It will be Intrigue, because she has her sample case in her free hand. She walks quickly, there is optimism in her stride. Today, perhaps, she'll make some sales.

In her studio, Nadia models a hand. She works fast. It is a palm, lying open, all the lines etched clear enough to read. She pauses and relaxes her own left hand on the bench, seeing the way the fingers curl up slightly, the hollowed palm with its net of lines exaggerated by the drying clay. She is curious about the lines, so intricate and so precise, stamped on her palms like brands. With a fine tool she teases the finger-ends into nails like her own, two bitten, one broken, one long. She uses her own long nail as a tool as she works, cleaning out the little wedges of clay from underneath it with her other thumbnail until there is a tiny pile like mouse-droppings scattered around the hand. The wrist is an ugly soft stump. She frowns, slices it off cleanly with a cheese-wire. Is that better? She stands back and considers it. She finds that her coffee is cold and is pleased, for that is a sign of absorption. This hand is the first thing she's been absorbed in for weeks. It may be pointless, but it is there, a fine, cold gesture, reaching out – or beckoning.

She looks through the peep-hole in the kiln. The pots are glowing cherry red. The last cone has bowed its head. She turns off the kiln. It makes a shuddery sigh, as if relieved. Now it will slowly cool, creaking and groaning. It will be a day before she can open it and take out the biscuit-fired pots, ready for their glaze. Once the pots are fired they are like stone again, they cannot be broken down except into useless shards. It is mysterious, the process, circular. First there is rock, which decomposes into clay, and then, after the digging, purifying and working, there is the firing, which transforms it into another kind of stone. But fragile.

She washes the grey clay off her hands, watches them grow pink in the hot water, the basin become filthy with the splashes. She is light-hearted. There is such satisfaction in making use of the morning, having something to show for it. Perhaps this is what she should do. Sculpture, sculpt from the human body. Perhaps she should employ a model, sculpt whole figures, sculpt all the different parts. To capture the language of the body, she thinks, that is it. The hesitations, the confidence, depression, friendliness, tension, exhilaration. Is it possible? As her toasted cheese bubbles under the grill she imagines an exhibition. Body Language? Voice of Clay? The Body Eloquent? There will be rows of faces – not the blank masks – eloquent faces and frozen limbs, held like question marks, exclamation marks, held in the poses that in living bodies are fleeting, are read subliminally. The Sublimation of the Subliminal? No! She grins into her toasted cheese. She eats standing up, gazing our of the window. In the Manner of the Word, perhaps? Iris returns, her umbrella furled under her arm, for it has stopped raining. By the dip of her head and the heavy way she places her feet, Nadia can see that she has had no success, that she is tired and fed up. There is no need to see her face to be able to tell that. This is what she must capture. Perhaps she will not use faces, perhaps facial expressions are too obvious, too easy. Faceless Voices? Who would be her model? Who would be grateful for a bit of cash? She hears Iris banging shut the front door. Iris might. Later she'll visit and ask her – and perhaps have her palm read too.

‘Hello.' Iris stands back from the door. ‘Come in, duck.'

Nadia can smell cooking. ‘Are you eating? It's nothing important. I can come back later.'

‘You look better,' Iris observes. ‘No, do come in, it doesn't matter. Would you like some?'

‘I've eaten.'

‘Sure?'

Iris leads her into the kitchen. ‘Your eyeshadow hasn't come yet,' she says.

‘Oh no, I didn't expect …'

‘Derek, it's Nadia from upstairs,' she calls through the wall. ‘Just hold on while I dish up,' she says.

She opens the oven and there is a rush of brown meaty fragrance. She brings out a Fray Bentos steak-and-kidney pie risen proud and crusty from its tin. ‘There's plenty for three,' she says, but Nadia shakes her head.

‘Perhaps I'll go. You don't want me hovering while you're eating. I'm sure Derek won't.'

‘Oh he's oblivious,' Iris says cheerfully. She tips a mound of steaming potatoes into a colander, shakes them and pours three-quarters of them onto one plate, the rest onto the other. She divides the pie into a large and a smaller piece. ‘Sure?' she asks, with the knife poised. Nadia nods. ‘No greens,' Iris apologises. ‘I know they're good for you but we can't stick them. Come through.'

She picks up the heavily laden plate and, pushing sideways through a dangling door-screen of gaudy plastic strips, leads Nadia into the sitting room. It is a dark room, the light muffled by heavy net curtains, the spaces cluttered with spindly bits of dark furniture, every surface crammed with blown-glass animals, seals and parrots and gaudy dogs. The television is switched on and in front of it there is an enormous red moquette armchair, of which Nadia can only see the back, and above it the top of a dark head.

‘Derek, this is Nadia; Nadia, Derek.' Iris leads Nadia round. Derek fills the armchair as if he has been modelled to fit it. His hair is long and his beard, luxuriant as any prophet's and liberally clotted with food, cascades over his belly. He nods at Nadia, and returns his eyes to the screen, where an animated fireman is climbing a ladder.

Iris puts a tray with a picture of Buckingham Palace on it onto his lap and then the plate of food. ‘We tend, usually, to watch TV while we eat,' he says, and his voice is a delicate well-bred surprise, as if the voice of a wood-pigeon had issued from the mouth of a frog.

‘I'll come back later,' Nadia says again, wishing to escape from the overwhelming smell of steak-and-kidney and another, stranger, smell she can't identify. ‘Daft of me to come at lunchtime. I get all out of sync., working alone.' Derek nods politely, but keeps his eyes on the screen. He begins shovelling potatoes into his mouth.

Iris beckons her out. ‘I'll eat in the kitchen, duck. Then we can talk without that racket. Cup of tea?'

‘Well if you're sure.'

Iris fills the kettle.

‘No. You sit down. I'll make tea while you eat your lunch,' Nadia says. ‘Much luck this morning?'

Iris sighs. ‘One stinking deodorant. What shall I do with the profit? World cruise, do you think?'

Nadia smiles. ‘I wondered if you'd do something for me. A bit of modelling. I'd pay.'

Iris snorts and a fragment of puff pastry flies across the table. ‘Modelling? Me? What for, a shipwreck?'

‘Some work I'm doing – some sculpture.'

‘I don't know … I mean I'm hardly Miss sodding World, am I?'

‘That doesn't matter.'

‘Would I have to strip off?'

‘I don't think so. I'm interested in your hands and feet …'

Iris looks at her rough stubby fingers, splays them in front of her. ‘Modelling! Wait till I tell Derek!'

‘So you will?'

‘Don't see why not.'

‘Wonderful. What about tomorrow, could you spare an hour in the morning?'

‘I'll have to consult my diary,' Iris says, and grins.

‘About ten? The other thing is, I wondered if you'd have time to do my fortune this afternoon – read my palm.'

‘Bless you. Course I will.'

‘How much?'

‘To you, five pounds. I have a sliding scale,' she explains, and licks gravy from her lips. ‘That's at the bottom of it. Don't mind Derek,' she says, lowering her voice, ‘he's sedentary by habit.' With her fork she mashes a potato into the gravy from her pie. She eats it with a faraway look in her eyes. ‘I fret about his heart. He eats like a frigging horse, but he doesn't work like one, that's what I say to him. All he does is sit, sit and eat and sleep. Loves his TV and his papers and a flutter on the horses. Does get into a lather over the horses.'

‘Does he get out? I've never seen him before.'

‘Tea's in the caddy,' Iris says. Nadia spoons it into the pot and puts on an orange woolly tea-cosy with a pom-pom on the top. ‘Out?' Iris laughs briefly and then her face falls and in that change of expression Nadia sees the elusiveness she'd love to capture. But can it be captured, made solid, fired even, into stone? And without the use of the face, is there a corresponding body-signal, the beginning of a gesture …?

‘He gets as far as the bog, and into bed. Like sleeping next to a wart-hog,' she says. ‘Snore?' She smiles grimly and lays down her knife and fork. Nadia recalls the rumbling last night, the sound she'd guessed was snoring, which vibrated through the floorboards.

‘Can you sleep through it?' she asks.

‘I sleep in the gaps,' Iris says. ‘I sleep for a second and then wake, all night, sleep/wake, sleep/wake, like one of those lights that flick on and off.'

‘A strobe? Can you really do that?'

‘I've learnt. Now let's pour the tea and then we'll go through. You can meet Darling. He's in the back today, in my room. Getting on Derek's wick this morning, wouldn't shut up. I'll just take Derek his coffee – he won't drink leaf tea,' she explains, spooning Nescafe into a cup. ‘Afraid I'll read something. He likes a biscuit though.' She takes a packet of Garibaldis from the cupboard. Nadia glimpses, before the cupboard door closes, a stack of tinned pies, and another of biscuits. The kitchen is full of old-fashioned things: a wooden-handled washing-up brush, a hand-knitted dishcloth, a big slab of green soap, a coronation tea-caddy, things that remind Nadia of her grandmother, although Iris isn't old, can't be more than fifty-five.

‘All right, that's him settled. Come through.' They carry their rattling cups and saucers into the back room. It's the room that corresponds to Nadia's studio upstairs, narrow and coldly lit. Nadia blenches at the stifling bird-stench, recognised now. She breathes through her mouth as she looks round. The room looks entirely different from her own, despite having the same shape and light. It is dominated by the crow in its majestic domed cage which is suspended from an elegant lamppost of a stand. But it is a homely room otherwise, with its flowery carpet and fat furniture – or would be if it were not for the liberal splattering of bird droppings and feathers.

‘Meet Darling.' Iris taps the bars of the cage.

‘Hello Darling,' Nadia says, but the bird looks morosely at the floor of its cage. It has a bald spot on top of its head and looks like a sour, disenchanted vicar.

‘He's always shy with strangers,' Iris says. She makes some loving, chuckling noises in her throat. ‘Moulting, aren't you? Normally you're a lovely glossy boy, aren't you?'

‘Never mind.' Nadia smiles and looks around the room for signs of fortune-telling. Under a blue cloth by the window is what looks like the crystal ball.

The bird shuffles along his perch, sticks his tail through the bars and ejects a long brown dropping onto the carpet.

Iris tuts. ‘Naughty boy,' she says. ‘I'll put the fire on. Always bloody cold in here.'

‘North-facing,' Nadia says.

‘Sit down, do.' Iris indicates one of the armchairs by the fire. She switches the fire on and there is an electric flickering under the logs. ‘Quite effective, don't you think?' she says, and Nadia doesn't know how to respond. There is an elusive teasing in Iris's voice. Is she serious?

She brushes the feathers off the chair and sits down opposite Iris.

‘Drink your tea and I'll do your leaves. Free gift. Sales incentive, they call it,' Iris says.

Nadia sips her tea, avoiding the large leaves floating on the surface. It is weak, grey, strange tea.

‘You look better,' Iris remarks, leaning forward and observing her.

‘Sort of,' agrees Nadia. She wonders if she is allergic to crows. Her eyes have started to itch.

‘China tea,' Iris says. ‘Only they usually drink it without milk.'

‘Oh?'

‘Fortune teller's tea. Better leaves, though as I say, anything will do. Finished? Leave a drop.' Nadia finishes her tea, bracing herself against the cooling slops, the leaves floating up against her lips. She picks a leaf from her mouth and replaces it in the cup.

‘Finished.'

Iris looks into the cup. ‘That's it. Now, turn the cup three times anti-clockwise. Concentrate. Shut your eyes.' Nadia does so, pinching her lips together against a smile. She's glad Simon can't see her sitting so foolishly between the fake fire and the sulking crow playing make-believe. Through the wall she can hear the drone of a racing commentator rising in excitement and a dull thud which must be Derek in a lather, thumping the arm of his chair or stamping. The crow belches.

‘He begs your pardon,' Iris says, taking the cup.

She turns it upside-down. ‘It has to drain,' she explains, ‘and then …' She turns the cup over and frowns into it, squinting and muttering. She looks up at Nadia as if puzzled, the electric firelight flickering oddly in her odd-coloured eyes.

‘I see a lover …' She pauses.

‘That's Simon, yes.'

‘I see a lover in danger. I see darkness. A bad omen …'

‘Oh God,' Nadia goes cold. ‘That's the cave. He's a caver.'

Iris looks into the cup again. ‘Could be … sometimes it's not
literal
, if you know what I mean.'

‘Metaphorical?'

‘I don't know about that. But it might not be a danger like caving, it could be a problem, a secret, a deceit … that kind of danger.'

‘But he is going caving, a dangerous expedition, he's supposed to be going this weekend! It
must
be that.'