THREE
and other Stories
by
Kathleen Jones
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A Book Mill Publication
Published by The Book Mill at Smashwords
Copyright © Kathleen Jones 2011
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ISBN 978-0-9567303-1-2
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The Book Mill is an imprint of Ferber Jones Ltd
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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THREE
1
In the dawn light that sharpened the edges of things, foregrounding the mountains against infinity, Val went down to the studio, stared critically at the clay form he’d shaped the previous day and then, clenching his massive hands into fists, he flattened it. The physical action of pounding the clay back into an abstract mass raised his blood pressure, making a vein at his temple thud against his skull. He did the same thing every morning and the ritual gave him an odd, destructive satisfaction.
Once, the clay had seemed an extension of his imagination, shaped and formed by the strength of his will. Now, the material that oozed and sucked between his fingers no longer gave him that childlike feeling of delight in its endless possibilities; it was merely a recalcitrant terracotta mass that took all his strength to handle.
Afterwards, breathing hard, he went to stand in the open doorway gazing out into the courtyard, where the early light reflected in pools of rainwater on the terrazzo. In the centre, on a block of rough marble, stood the statue of Europa being carried off by Zeus disguised as a bull. It was a sculpture Val had executed when he was forty, and every day he looked at it to remind himself of what he was capable of.
‘Why did you want to depict a rape? ’ the girl had said when she first arrived. ‘And by an animal at that? Even if it is mythical.’
‘It’s not about sexual politics,’ Val had argued impatiently. ‘It’s about form. Do you know how difficult it is to get the bull like that with his hind legs reared up to lift the girl? And to make both forms work from every angle?’
‘The Greeks did three.’
‘But perhaps I will also do three before I die.’
Ursula’s eyes had expressed disbelief.
‘Of course I never sleep,’ he’d patiently explained. ‘I’ve overcome the need for it. Sleep is wasteful. All the human body needs are little pauses.’ He thought of them as rests on a musical stave - the silence between one phrase and the next.
The girl still looked sceptical. ‘But what about the mind? Doesn’t that need sleep?’
He had shaken his head contemptuously. Sometimes he wondered whether she was laughing at him. ‘You think the mind sleeps when the body does? What keeps your heart ticking, your lungs breathing? Why do you dream if your mind is asleep? No, it keeps going all the time like a clock.’
The girl’s flesh was sleek. Several times over the past weeks, as he looked at her, his fingers had itched for a pencil to trace out her form, though he had done nothing he could be satisfied with. Yet. But she made him feel the promise of it. There was an energy about her that made Val feel capable of anything. That girl with her springing red hair - her wide, frank mouth. And her hands. Her beautiful, muscular hands.
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Ursula woke at seven and listened to the sounds of vehicles ascending the tortuous mountain road. At every blind corner she could hear their horns challenging the bird song in the olive groves - the blaring claxons of the camions, the ululating peals of the Fiats, the tin whistle piping of little Apés. She lay for a while watching the play of light on the tiled ceiling and wondered whether to get up and do an hour’s work in the studio, but it was pointless without her sitter. Freda would not be up until nine and then it would be at least another hour before she would be ready to pose. Working from memory invited deception, because no amount of photographs or caliper readings could give you the shape of the human personality that needed to be captured and imprisoned within armatures and clay.
There were soft stirrings throughout the house; the sound of fires being raked out, the banging of pots. Ursula inhaled the scents of wood ash and coffee. Soon she would go down to the dining room with its views out over the Tuscan hills and there would be espresso and brioche and a bowl of fruit waiting on the table. Freda would appear, still half asleep, and pour herself some coffee. She would sit at the table with the tiny cup propped between her hands, elbows askew and gradually Freda’s eyes would become less vague, the muscles of her face would tauten and then finally she would smile and make some strange, tangential remark, as if coming in on the middle of a conversation that had been going on before she arrived.
She pronounced her name Frayda in the Swedish fashion. Her husband Val said that it meant cold and frosty, like a feminine form of the Italian freddo. And indeed she was very cool and northern - thin and tall and pale with a silvery quality as if you could reach out and put your hand through the shimmering atoms of her flesh. Her face was a pale oval with eyes like glacial melt-water and her hair a long, smooth, fall of silver.
In the morning Ursula sometimes sat on the end of Freda’s bed and watched her groom it, head to one side, stabbing at it with an old, dirty, silver-backed brush. Then, with a quick turn of her strong, bony wrists, Freda would twist it all into a tight coil at the back of her head and thrust a tortoiseshell comb through it. Ursula had once seen Val reflected in the mirror as he too, stood in the doorway watching her. He had the strangest expression on his face, but when Ursula turned her head to look at him he had quickly masked it and turned away.
Valdemar Mäe. A Russian Lithuanian. Or perhaps it was the other way round? He was, in any case, one of the greatest living sculptors in Europe. He had promised to teach Ursula everything he knew. He came to live here during the winter because of the foundry - they cast bronzes cheaper in Italy than anywhere else in Europe and there was a long tradition of craftsmanship in the making of moulds and the intricacies of lost wax. The foreman boasted that his forebears had worked for Michael Angelo - See! he would say, pointing to an old, cracked structure with sagging pantiles, That was where he stayed when he was here!