‘Apparently they would,’ she says, holding them out.
The Salten House Old Girls’ Association invites
................................................
to the Alumnae Summer Ball.
In the space on each card is scrawled our names, handwritten in navy-blue fountain pen.
Kate Atagon
Fatima Chaudhry (née Qureshy)
Thea West
Isa Wilde
Kate holds them, fanned like playing cards, as though inviting us to take one, make a bet.
But I am not looking at the names, or the embossed gilt lettering of the text itself. I am looking at the hole, stabbed through each card by the pin holding them to the corkboard. And I am thinking that, however much we struggled to be free, this is how it always ends, the four of us, skewered together by the past.
ART WAS AN extra for most of us at Salten House, an ‘enrichment’ the school called it, unless you were studying it for an exam, which I was not, so it was some weeks into the term, when the days at Salten had become almost routine, by the time I encountered the art studios, and Ambrose Atagon.
Like most boarding schools, Salten groups pupils in school houses, each named for a Greek goddess. Fatima and I had been put in the same house, Artemis, goddess of the hunt, so our enrichment came round at the same time, and we both found ourselves searching for the studios one frosted October morning after breakfast, walking back and forth across the quad, looking for anyone more knowledgeable than ourselves to ask.
‘Where the bloody hell is it?’ Fatima said again, for the tenth time, and for perhaps the eighth time I answered:
‘I don’t know, but we’ll find it. Stop panicking.’
As the words left my mouth, a second year clutching a huge pad of watercolour paper shot past in the direction of the maths rooms and I called out, ‘Hey, you! Are you heading to art?’
She turned round, her face pink with haste.
‘Yes, but I’m late. What is it?’
‘We’ve got art too, we’re lost, can we follow you?’
‘Yes, but hurry.’ She bolted through an archway covered with white snowberries, and through a wooden door we’d never seen before, hidden in the shadows of the snowberry bush.
Inside there was the inevitable flight of steps – I have never been so fit, since leaving Salten – and we followed her up, and up, two or three flights at least until I began to wonder where on earth we were heading.
At last, the stairs opened out onto a small landing with a wire-hatched glass door, which the girl flung open.
Inside was a long vaulted gallery, the walls low, but the roof arching to a triangular point. The space above our heads was criss-crossed with supporting beams and braces, all hung with drying sketches and balanced with strange items, presumably to be used for still-life compositions – an empty birdcage, a broken lute, a stuffed marmoset, its eyes sad and wise.
There were no windows, for the walls were too low, just skylights in the vaulted roof, and I realised that we must be in the attics above the maths classrooms. The space was flooded with winter sunlight and filled with objects and pictures, entirely unlike any of the other classrooms I had seen so far – white-painted, sterile, and painfully clean – and I stood in the doorway, blinking at the dazzling impression.
‘Sorry, Ambrose,’ the second year gasped, and I blinked again. Ambrose? That was another strangeness. The other teachers at Salten were routinely female, and referred to as Miss whatever their surname was, regardless of their marital status.
No one, but no one, used first names.
I turned, to see the person she had addressed so informally.
And I caught my first sight of Ambrose Atagon.
I once tried to describe Ambrose to an old boyfriend, before I met Owen, but I found it almost impossible. I have photographs, but they only show a man of middle height, with wiry dark hair, and shoulders curved from hunching perpetually over a sketch. He had Kate’s thin mobile face, and years of sketching in the sun and squinting against the bright light of the bay had worn his skin into lines that made him look somehow paradoxically younger than his forty-five years, not older. And he had Kate’s slate-blue eyes, the only remarkable feature he possessed, but even they don’t come alive in a photograph the way they do in my memory – for Ambrose was so alive – always working, laughing, loving … his hands never still, always rolling a cigarette, or sketching a drawing or throwing back a glass of the harsh red wine he kept in two-litre bottles under the sink at the Mill – too rough for anyone else to drink.
Only an artist of the calibre of Ambrose himself could have captured all that life, the contradictions of his still concentration and restless energy, and the mysterious magnetic attraction of a man of very ordinary appearance.
But he never made a self-portrait. Or not that I know of. Ironic, really, when he drew anything and everything around him – the birds on the river, the girls at Salten House, the fragile marsh flowers that shivered and blew in the summer breeze, the ripple of wind on the Reach …
He drew Kate obsessively, littering the house with sketches of her eating, swimming, sleeping, playing … and later he drew me, and Thea, and Fatima, though he always asked our permission. I remember it still, his halting, slight gravelly voice, so like Kate’s. ‘Do you, um, mind if I draw you?’
And we never minded. Though maybe we should have.
One long sunny afternoon he drew me, sitting at the kitchen table with the strap of my dress falling from one shoulder, my chin in my hands, and my eyes fixed on him. And I can still remember the feel of the sun on my cheek, and the heat of my gaze upon him, and the little electric shock that happened every single time he glanced up at my face from his sketch, and our eyes met.
He gave me the drawing, but I don’t know what happened to it. I gave it to Kate, because there was nowhere to hide it at school, and it didn’t feel right to show my parents, or the girls at Salten House. They would not have understood. No one would have understood.
After his disappearance there were whispers – his past, his drug convictions, the fact that he didn’t have a single teaching qualification to his name. That first day though, I knew none of this. I had no idea of the part that Ambrose would play in our lives, and we in his, or how the ripples of our meeting would go on reverberating down the years. I just stood, holding the strap of my bag and panting, as he straightened from his position, hunched over a pupil’s easel. He looked across at me with those blue, blue eyes, and he smiled, a smile that crinkled the skin above his beard, and at the corners of his eyes.