THE ART TEACHER

Yvonne Stanley is an art teacher with a painful medical history...

Yvonne Stanley stood in front of her class and smiled at the rows of eager faces staring at her. These, she thought, are the future. They have the talent and the vision to see where their less imaginative friends can’t hope to even imagine shadows. Yvonne had a huge belief in the power of inner vision. It had brought her through quite a lot

For a moment time stood still. She was there at the front of expecting faces, her long beige skirt brushing her shoes like they always did. Then something happened.

She couldn’t help it. She started crying. Real tears like unbidden floods forming in her eyes and trickling down her cheeks. It was the heightened emotions of the moment. She had come so far and was at that moment at a peak she’d only dreamed of reaching. She’d been ill, very ill, and now she was high on her own personal mountain.

“We must create our perfect image,” she said, trying not to sound as if she was sobbing, “we must put ourselves in a world where all that exists is in our heart, and draw from that.”

Not all the class looked intense. In fact, few did. Some looked gobsmacked as if the whole idea of a teacher crying because of beauty was somehow ridiculous. There was one young fellow at the back leering. She was sure he’d been born leering and probably always would. She would have asked him why had she known his name. Then the girl on the front row, pretty as a picture but false as gods. She can’t have had the beauty of art in her mind. She, more like, was wondering when she was going to get her next kiss, or worse. Yvonne knew the type.

“Try it,” she encouraged, her tears magically drying, “think of perfection, think of the way light shines onto it, and draw it. See its every reflection. Even black charcoal can be made to look like light.”

There was a rustling in the room. Nobody was quite sure what he or she was supposed to be doing. But they’d get the idea. Perfection as a concept was a stone cottage in the forest, a winding trail, barely trod, leading up to its door, an old woman in Victorian clothes standing in its doorway, wringing her hands while the sky grew darker and a flash of lightning tore her withered face into shreds.

She had to do it. She had to sketch it so that the class might get a chance of seeing what she meant by perfection. There was paper on her easel, so she picked up a knob of charcoal and the cottage and its damp walls, the old woman in her antique finery, the heavy skies, appeared in fragile outline with only a few sweeps of her practised hands. She was an artist, but now, in the village hall, she was an art teacher. But she did know how to conjure ideas from her own mind, and put them onto media, this time onto paper with charcoal.

“That’s good, miss…” said the pretty girl at the front, smiling with a kind of half formed understanding on her lips.

“That’s good, miss,” echoed the leering youth from the back, insolent and determined to be so.

“I think it’s lovely,” sighed Timmy, the one name she knew because it belonged to her son.

“Why, Timmy, what’s lovely about it?” she asked, for once grateful that the organisers had said it was alright for Timmy to join the class. Mostly she didn’t want any suggestion of nepotism but for the art to stand for itself, but Timmy would be all right. Wouldn’t he?

“Mummy’s boy…” leered offensively from the back, and she ignored it.

“What I’ve been led to believe,” she said firmly, “is that this class is made up of artists. Of young people with talent, young people who want to create something special…”

“I do,” nodded the pretty girl at the front, and Yvonne could tell she meant it. She might have been yearning for her next kiss, but she also understood beauty. It was on her face, the subtlety with which she painted her own flesh with own-brand cosmetics from the supermarket.

“I can see,” she replied.

“I want to draw girls’ tits,” contributed the leering boy, and a couple of his mates giggled at the rudeness of it, saying words like that to a lovely lady teacher. “They’re beauty,” he added as if needing to excuse his own vulgarity, “they’re perfection. My birds’ tits, lovely-jubbly!”

“You think so? What’s your name?” she asked, needing a direct confrontation with his insolence.

“Me? What you wanna know that for?” he asked, suddenly unsure of himself.

“Because you know my name.” Her point was clear. He did know her name. It was on the door of the room. This was Miss Yvonne Stanley’s art class, and those who came were there because they wanted to be. Allegedly.

“Don Juan,” he grinned back at her, “though you can call me Donny if you like, Miss…”

“So what was it you wanted to draw?” she asked, “you did try to say, but it came out all garbled, in much the same way as your name came out all garbled, Donny-boy!”

That woke the sleepers up. A ripple started, and it embarrassed Donny-boy. She could see it in his face. But he’d been asked a question. He’d started the discussion, and he’d reached an impasse.

“B***s,” he said, cleaning his language the least little bit. After all, two synonymous nouns mean exactly the same thing as each other, don’t they?

“You mean breasts?” she asked.

And then she pulled off the beige top she had chosen to wear that morning and the special bra she wore, and showed him what the surgeon had left when he’d removed one of her breasts. As mastectomies go he’d done a lovely job, but it wasn’t quite normal.

“You want to draw this?” she asked, “and Timmy, stop gawping! Now everyone, I want you to create something beautiful and perfect on your paper, and please don’t make it as ugly as this.”.

And she replaced her beige top as if she’d done something perfectly normal, and smiled at the class. “It doesn’t have to be an old cottage,” she said, “that’s just my own special place. It can be anything at all. What do you think, Don?”

But Don didn’t think at all. He knew when he was beaten.

© Peter Rogerson 30.08.22

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