Part Four

May

Chapter 20

Audrey

Audrey glanced up at the naked man in front of her, heat pinching her cheeks.

He was young, tall, muscular, his skin the color of caramel, with a sheen that made you want to reach out and stroke it. There was no readable expression on his face, nothing to indicate what he was thinking. His eyes were raised, staring up at the skylight through which the sun was streaming, bathing him in a celestial glow.

Audrey shrugged off the cardigan draped over her shoulders and prepared to begin.

Picking up her pencil, she made the first tentative strokes on the paper in front of her, just the lightest impression of an outline. Around the room, gathered in a semicircle, seven other life-drawing students stood at their easels. And walking behind them, offering advice and encouragement, was their tutor, Virginia.

Audrey stared at the hesitant sketch marks she’d made. She needed to be bolder, more decisive—Virginia had been telling her so for the past two weeks since she’d started the class. Follow the shapes you see, not the shapes you think you see. Teach your brain to unthink what it knows about the way an arm hangs from the shoulders, the way a head emerges from a neck, the way a rib cage narrows into the waist. Discard your preconceptions about the human body and think purely in terms of shape, form, and lines.

Audrey leaned back on her stool, surveying her work in progress. No amount of self-delusion could persuade her that she had a natural talent for this, but that wasn’t the point.

Glancing sideways, Audrey looked at Mia’s drawing: it was in a different league. It wasn’t just a case of grandparental pride. You could hear it in Virginia’s approbation every time she walked around the class appraising their efforts.

Looking at Mia’s work, Audrey reassured herself that she’d made the right decision. She didn’t like deceiving Jess but Mia had been so passionate, so persuasive. And it had seemed such a small thing to ask: just the loan of the course fees for a weekly Saturday morning class at the Royal College of Art. Mum wouldn’t lend me the money even if she could afford it, you know she wouldn’t. She thinks even the smallest distraction from studying is a disaster. But I won’t let it affect my coursework, I promise. I just really want to do it, Granny. And I promise I’ll pay you back. I’ll get a holiday job and pay back every penny, I swear.

Money wasn’t the issue, they both knew that. It was the duplicity. Audrey didn’t allow herself to imagine Jess’s fury if she ever found out they’d gone behind her back. But as far as Audrey was concerned, attending weekly art classes was hardly the pinnacle of teenage rebellion or the stuff of parental nightmares.

It had been Audrey’s idea to accompany Mia. It wasn’t that she had a burning desire to test her own artistic abilities. It was simply the fact of having Mia to herself for one whole morning a week when her granddaughter wasn’t squirreled away in her bedroom studying. Although now she was here, Audrey was finding the class calming in ways she hadn’t expected. There was something meditative in the gentle scratch of pencil against paper, in shapes emerging where once there had been nothing, in the collective sound made by eight students each at their own easel.