Our Dancing Days - Lucy English

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Tessa, ‘but was enlarged in the fourteenth and then again to its present size in 1585. The windows of the great hall came from a nearby nunnery and are in two different styles, decorated and perpendicular.’

      ‘Oh, I say!’ said Coral.

      Pumpkin studied the list. ‘It doesn’t say here about the windows. You know the place, then?’

      Tessa stood up to go. ‘Actually, I used to live there.’

      She cycled back across Bristol in the rain and up the slow climb to Totterdown. She kicked open her front door and clattered the bicycle in the corridor. Why the bloody hell did I take that on? I don’t want to go to Suffolk, and go to St John’s. Shit! She was soaking wet, and as she threw her wet clothes across the bedroom was confronted with an image of herself first arriving in Bristol after hitching in the rain. She had left Suffolk with nothing, not even a rucksack. She pulled on dry clothes. She was so angry she was close to tears, but it was a long time since Tessa had wept.

      I left it all, I left the whole damn lot!

      Don had kept sending her things in parcels, and then the money, but she sent it all back. She had bought this house herself with the money she earned from painting and knew every inch of it intimately, since for the last eight years she had scraped and peeled it down to its bones. The house was hers, absolutely hers. Murray had never lived there. Nothing here is yours! She had given up sharing things.

      She sat on her bed staring at another of her bleak canvases. Ring up those two bitches, tell them to stuff their assignment! But the hard forms of the painting gave her inspiration; ice and steel, rock and stone, bone. Stone blunts scissors, scissors cut … what’s scaring you? she thought. It was not part of her present self to be emotional. Murray leaving, Claudia’s baby, she had coped with that. It’s a job. Paint the damn place then sod off. She thought how completely she had created her environment here, all hers, bare wood furniture, plain walls, cream, white. She knew everything in her house down to the furthest corner of the most hidden cupboard and her mind scanned these places.

      Then she remembered the box she had not sent back. It arrived unexpectedly long after the other parcels and she kept it in her last moment of sentimentality. Under the stairs, seven years ago. She searched it out and took it up to her studio, which was the place she felt most inviolate.

      Dusty, a letter – ‘Dear, dear Tessa, please keep these. One day I hope you will forgive us, Don.’ Soppy. Rubbish. She screwed it up. The box was full of photographs. She tipped them on the floor, her life in one heap. There were she and Dee-Dee, spades in hand, smiling in front of the vegetable garden, long hair, wellies, Peruvian jumpers and floppy skirts, stupid clothes for gardening. Don in the orchard in his dressing gown with a basket of apples, smiling. The dressing gown was his coat … St John’s in the snow and all of them outside, smiling. ‘We are the smiling revolution.’ A pile of happy people, summer fairs, winter bonfires.

      It wasn’t like that, thought Tessa … And here were she and Don again, in white because that was their wedding. Shit. And she and Dee-Dee swimming in the moat. Tessa felt herself slipping again down the embankment. There were older photographs too; Swinging London, she and Dee-Dee in mini skirts, and now one in black and white, two little girls in a suburban garden, Theresa and Deirdre, puffed sleeves, buckle shoes, arms round each other, smiling …

      It was late August, the Saturday before the bank holiday. The weather throughout the summer had been indifferent, some might even have called it rotten, but Tessa did not care for sunshine for with it came droves of people, in summer clothes, soaking up the day like pink sponges, with noisy children, grandmothers, dogs and radios. And at the moment Tessa did not care for people.

      She had now been in Suffolk for ten days. The rain had slowed her work, for although she preferred damp landscapes, it was more difficult to sketch satisfactorily under dripping trees. At Heveningham she tried for two hours to draw the ribbon wall, but spent most of the time in the orangery avoiding a thunderstorm.

      She was in her hotel room in Bury St Edmunds surveying her work. She was quite pleased. They were rough sketches on rain-blotched paper, but she could see how they could progress. Remember, light on stone mullions, indigo shadows under cedar trees. She scribbled notes on the paper. Remember, wet skies, big clouds. The light, pale gold, could be pale green. Sienna-ripe wheat, barley’s softer … Tessa had travelled right through Suffolk, from the rolling willow-banked fields of the Essex borders and the Stour valley to the bleaker wheatlands of what is called High Suffolk, which is almost a joke since nothing except church towers are really high in Suffolk, to outside Bury St Edmunds, the hedgeless fields, agribusiness wheat deserts, no weeds, no poppies, no cornflowers. But it’s not got worse, thought Tessa, remembering exactly what it was like to be in the middle of a wheatfield, when the far end of it was ages away, and the trees by the ditches seemed tiny. And Tessa paused with this image of herself, ‘walking away from the Hall’, and as she saw herself becoming tiny in the distance, she felt uneasy and uncertain, for she had yet to go to St John’s.

      I’m slipping, she thought, and she was tired, for she had worked hard, concentrating on forms and colours and angles and light and the present, always the present, the now of the image in front of her, nothing at all to do with memories. And Tessa felt sad and vulnerable. Ring up P. and C., said one part of her; oh weak, weak, where’s your steel? Where’s your ice? said another. And she thought of her stark canvases, but they were miles away on the other side of England.

      She wrote a postcard to Murray. ‘Hope you enjoy the Festival. Couldn’t make it this year. I’m on an assignment in Suffolk. Love to Claudia and the kid.’ She had never told Murray much about Suffolk and what she did say was rather vague. Oh, I lived there in the seventies with some hippies. Her life before him held little interest for him. He was a man of the present. She licked the stamp. She had a picture of him in her mind at the opening of one of her exhibitions. Murray, in the centre of the room with a group of people around him. He was a tall man. He turned round suddenly to look for her and in that sweeping movement seemed to Tessa like a magician who could conjure up who he wanted, and make disappear who he didn’t want. She decided she wouldn’t write to him again.

      She left her room and went to the abbey gardens; the hotel faced one of the old gatehouses. Bury St Edmunds was lively that Saturday; the market was on, the car parks were full, in the abbey gardens were people enjoying themselves in the manner Tessa found so repugnant. But now she was preoccupied.

      The abbey, the burial place of St Edmund, had once been huge, the largest ecclesiastical building in Britain. Its size today would compare to a shopping complex, but there was virtually nothing left of it, eroded since the Reformation by weather, and also by townsfolk who used the place as a quarry; there were many houses in Bury built out of the abbey. Only a few portions of wall and excavated foundations remained. The lumps of stone, to Tessa, were baffling, a piece here, another bit at the far end of the gardens. A sign said ‘The Dormitory’ – did monks really sleep there? She couldn’t imagine it – where? There wasn’t anywhere. She stood in the nave by the high altar. Over her head should have been a vaulted roof but instead there was the Suffolk sky with hanging clouds moving slowly. It would have all vanished, thought Tessa, if someone hadn’t preserved it. It was time for her to start working.

      From Bury St Edmunds she drove east and north, for St John’s was close to the Norfolk border. She had hitched up and down this road dozens of times but now the road was wider and faster, bypassing all the villages – the windmill at Stanton; Botesdale and Rickinghall Superior, so close to each other they were quite entangled; Walsham-le-Willows. She was watching the road signs. Harlesdon, with its wide, open street and Georgian houses. Ten miles to go. The road ran alongside the Waveney. Here she felt she must know every tree. Wortwell. It’s a job, I’m on a job. Piccadilly Corner. Wasn’t that where? … Six places, three sketches of each … Flixton, the old aerodrome, it’s been ploughed up. Well, the pub’s been tarted … Earsham … I waited for a lift there for three hours once. Then just before Bungay she turned off the main road with the lorries and holiday cars

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