Greyglass by Tanith Lee (story read aloud .TXT) 📕

Tavern, she had touched, without thinking, on the subject. Finding him interested in what she said, which always inordinately pleased, foolishly almost inebriated her, she had gone on and on.

“This place. Sounds visually fantastic. Especially with all those trees. Could it still be like that?” he had asked.

“Oh, I’d think so. More like it really. More overgrown and so on. They weren’t into domestic stuff, just cats.”

“Three years ago.”

“About three years.”

“So, for a donation… They’d let me paint there, wouldn’t they?”

“What would you donate?” she had asked playfully, glancing into his summer-golden eyes.

“A fiver. Why not? And give them a painting maybe, for their jumble sales. Anyhow, they’ll remember you.”

“They might not,” she said carefully. “I only met that woman once, and I’ve changed a lot. I was only sixteen.”

By then they had walked back to Patrick’s room in Belmont Court. Sitting on the floor with the coloured candles lit, they discussed their – Patrick’s – plan. By midnight, when they lay down together on the bed, it was all decided. The next day was Thursday and life-drawing, but everyone already knew the regular model had bronchitis and might not come, which would mean improvised still life of something unappetising, like stacked books and chairs. They were into their third year, both worked generally with application; blind eyes were sometimes turned to absences.

After their lovemaking in the bed, with which the room was furnished, and as Patrick slept, Susan lay looking up at the two authentic plaster roses in the high ceiling. The electric wiring was tied off there, only the roses remained, like the ornate acanthuses at the big room’s corners, and in the halls outside. Then the last candle flickered out. An odd thought came to Susan as she drifted asleep, that the plasterwork had actually physically vanished now it was no longer visible.

Belmont Court’s old Victorian lift woke her, as it always did when she was there, clanking up and down from six thirty a.m. onwards.

Susan got up, used the bathroom on Patrick’s floor, and left. It was only twenty minutes through the early streets to her own room – space no longer shared with Jo, or with anyone.

Susan’s room though was not so gracious as Patrick’s, nor did she have Patrick’s small fridge, and the milk, left under cold water, had gone off in the warmth of savage May.

She had arranged to meet him in the college pub at noon. They would have a sandwich and a drink and then set off for the house. For the house that was, which had once been her grandmother’s.

Even in the bright morning, gulping back Nescafé and washing underclothes in the grubby bathroom downstairs, Susan did not feel any qualms about having elaborated to Patrick on the jungles of the vegetable house. Or about travelling over there with him later, and asking the cat women if they could paint in the wild garden, or stay overnight a couple of nights in a sleeping bag, on one of the empty floors.

“After all, it’s your rightful ancestral home,” had said Patrick, jaunty. “From what you said, they’re not going to object, unless we evilly molest their cats.”

How had she got on to speaking about the house, the garden, her grandmother? By nine the next morning, she began to wonder, but couldn’t recall. Of course, Susan had mentioned Catherine to Patrick before, just as she had told him rather a lot more about her elusive mother, Anne.

Patrick himself seldom commented on what Susan revealed, though he listened thoughtfully. But then he rarely made comments on anyone, apart from their looks. He was always more interested in appearances, objects, views, the things which were integral to his work as an artist. He was, she thought, a very good artist, an active artist. For herself she seemed only able to copy what she saw to a more or less adequate degree, but Patrick – reinvented.

He hoped to get to one of the top schools in London after his time at Silverguilds, to which he had anyway migrated, halfway through Susan’s post-foundation first year, from Manchester. But they never discussed that at any length either. Just as they never discussed any protracted or developed union between them, or its cessation. Sometimes, when she caught herself surreptitiously watching him in shock, Susan considered if they, as a pair, were bound to go anywhere beyond their present condition. Really she did not think so, could not imagine it. The future was endless, but indefinite. Even now, she never made demands or suggested extensions, such as their living together. That was from a sort of lazy fear of his possible – probable – unwillingness. And from disbelief too, for Patrick never seemed entirely real. Though she admired him, was quite happy when with him, he also placed a definite sense of duress upon her – because he was another person. He was a stranger. Susan thought she didn’t understand him, could never do so, beyond the most obvious elements. Perhaps she did not try. She was, in a way she did not fully know then, and only saw years after, afraid – not only of upsetting or offending him – but of him. Of his presence in her life.

So, to lose him simply inevitably through the course of time and events was a miserable idea she did not dwell on, but one which also brought her a feeling of relief.

As she pushed another T-shirt into the canvas bag, Susan realised she didn’t want to go to Catherine’s house.

Between one thrust into the bag and the next, her mood was altered. It had seemed all right, mildly adventurous, last night or earlier today. But now it seemed – wrong.

She knew it would be difficult to change Patrick’s mind. That much she had learned about him. He was absolute in what he wanted to do where it concerned his work.

The first time he had come up to her had been to do with his work. She had already seen him