The sun glared down brightly. For Magick you needed the night, a glittering candle guttering in the dark, not this over-exposure. Viola threw away the stick and sighed at the heat. She had so far removed her boots, jacket and skirt and headscarf and was still wearing more clothes than anyone else on the beach. She was down to an antique petticoat and a mismatched long-sleeved bodice, fussy ribboned things trimmed with broderie anglaise which she had found in a second-hand shop. Unknown to Viola, the petticoat had originally belonged to a shop girl who had died of consumption and who would have been shocked and not at all pleased to see her undergarments on display on a beach in Devon.
Viola gave up on her sea-watch and rolled another cigarette. She loathed the seaside. Every summer when she was small, when they were still a proper family, they had gone to cold, wet beaches for their obligatory summer holiday. Purgatory as far as Viola was concerned. It must have been her father’s idea. Her mother had probably wanted to go somewhere warm and sunny where they could enjoy themselves, but her father had the kind of Puritan streak that would consider a beach by the North Sea to be good for a child. She sucked furiously on the roll-up. Her childhood had been warped by his reasonableness. She lay back on the sand and stared at the cloudless sky while contemplating the unbearable tedium of her life. This in itself soon grew tedious and she sat up and pulled a book out of the bottomless rucksack.
She had never been without a book for as long as she could remember. An only child never is. Literature had fuelled her childhood fantasies and convinced her that one day she would be the heroine of her own narrative. Throughout her teens she inhabited the nineteenth century, roaming the moors with the Bront?s, feeling vexed at the constraint of Austen’s drawing rooms. Dickens was her—rather sentimental—friend, George Eliot her more rigorous one. Viola was currently rereading an old copy of Cranford. Mrs. Gaskell did not feel at home in Adam’s Acre, where the reading matter ran from Hunter S. Thompson to Patanjali’s Sutras with not much in between. Viola sat on the hot sand, twirling a lock of hair around her finger, a long-time habit that annoyed everyone except Viola herself, and wondered why she hadn’t worked harder at university instead of being led astray by Dominic and lying around smoking dope. She could have been a lecturer herself by now. A professor even. The sun flared on Mrs. Gaskell’s bright white pages and Viola suspected that she was about to get a headache. Her mother had, basically, died of a headache.
This short entente was broken by Sunny reversing his decision about the satsuma, but instead of eating it he threw it at Bertie, an action which led to a violent shouting match between the two of them, halted only by the diversionary tactic of giving them money to go and buy ice-creams. There was a van up on the promenade and Viola watched them tramping along towards it until she couldn’t make them out any longer. She closed her eyes. Five minutes’ peace, was that too much to ask?
Viola was in her first year at a brutalist concrete-and-glass university when she met Dominic Villiers, an art-school drop-out still hanging around the fringes of academic life. He was the scion (Viola had to look the word up) of a semi-aristocratic family. His legendary drug use, his public-school background and the wealthy parents he had rejected in order to live in painterly squalor all gave him a certain cachet. Viola, desperate to rebel and throw off her provincial middle-class chains, by proxy if nothing else, was attracted to his infamy.
Dominic was also very good-looking and she was flattered when, after circling around her for several weeks, he finally pounced (albeit lethargically, if one can pounce lethargically) and said, “Come back to mine?” No etchings on offer in his squalid flat, but plenty of large canvases that looked as if they’d had primary colours simply thrown at them. “You can tell?” he said, impressed that she understood his technique. Viola, philistine that she was, couldn’t help thinking, But I could do that.
“Do they sell?” she asked innocently and received a patient lecture about “subverting the exchange relationship between producer and consumer.”
“You mean by giving stuff away?” she said, baffled. As an only child she never gave anything away.
“Hey,” he said laconically when he turned round from appreciating his own art and saw her lying naked on his grubby sheets.
He lived off benefits, which was cool, he said, because it meant the “Stalinist state” was paying for him to produce art.
“The taxpayer, you mean?” Teddy said. Viola had delayed taking her “beau” (Teddy’s word, he had searched for something innocuous) home for a long time, afraid that her father’s quietly conservative views and the orderly restraint of his house in York would reflect badly on her. She thought with distaste of her father’s garden, neat rows of salvia, alyssum and lobelia in red, white and blue. Why not just plant a Union Jack? “It’s not patriotism,” he protested. “I happen to think that those colours go nicely together.”
“Gardens,” Dominic said.
Teddy waited for the rest of the sentence but it never came. “You like them?” he prompted.
“Yeah, they’re great. My people have a maze.”