ART WAS AN extra for most of us at Salten House, an ‘enrichment’ the school called it, unless you were studying it for an exam, which I was not, so it was some weeks into the term, when the days at Salten had become almost routine, by the time I encountered the art studios, and Ambrose Atagon.
Like most boarding schools, Salten groups pupils in school houses, each named for a Greek goddess. Fatima and I had been put in the same house, Artemis, goddess of the hunt, so our enrichment came round at the same time, and we both found ourselves searching for the studios one frosted October morning after breakfast, walking back and forth across the quad, looking for anyone more knowledgeable than ourselves to ask.
‘Where the bloody hell is it?’ Fatima said again, for the tenth time, and for perhaps the eighth time I answered:
‘I don’t know, but we’ll find it. Stop panicking.’
As the words left my mouth, a second year clutching a huge pad of watercolour paper shot past in the direction of the maths rooms and I called out, ‘Hey, you! Are you heading to art?’
She turned round, her face pink with haste.
‘Yes, but I’m late. What is it?’
‘We’ve got art too, we’re lost, can we follow you?’
‘Yes, but hurry.’ She bolted through an archway covered with white snowberries, and through a wooden door we’d never seen before, hidden in the shadows of the snowberry bush.
Inside there was the inevitable flight of steps – I have never been so fit, since leaving Salten – and we followed her up, and up, two or three flights at least until I began to wonder where on earth we were heading.
At last, the stairs opened out onto a small landing with a wire-hatched glass door, which the girl flung open.
Inside was a long vaulted gallery, the walls low, but the roof arching to a triangular point. The space above our heads was criss-crossed with supporting beams and braces, all hung with drying sketches and balanced with strange items, presumably to be used for still-life compositions – an empty birdcage, a broken lute, a stuffed marmoset, its eyes sad and wise.
There were no windows, for the walls were too low, just skylights in the vaulted roof, and I realised that we must be in the attics above the maths classrooms. The space was flooded with winter sunlight and filled with objects and pictures, entirely unlike any of the other classrooms I had seen so far – white-painted, sterile, and painfully clean – and I stood in the doorway, blinking at the dazzling impression.
‘Sorry, Ambrose,’ the second year gasped, and I blinked again. Ambrose? That was another strangeness. The other teachers at Salten were routinely female, and referred to as Miss whatever their surname was, regardless of their marital status.
No one, but no one, used first names.
I turned, to see the person she had addressed so informally.
And I caught my first sight of Ambrose Atagon.
I once tried to describe Ambrose to an old boyfriend, before I met Owen, but I found it almost impossible. I have photographs, but they only show a man of middle height, with wiry dark hair, and shoulders curved from hunching perpetually over a sketch. He had Kate’s thin mobile face, and years of sketching in the sun and squinting against the bright light of the bay had worn his skin into lines that made him look somehow paradoxically younger than his forty-five years, not older. And he had Kate’s slate-blue eyes, the only remarkable feature he possessed, but even they don’t come alive in a photograph the way they do in my memory – for Ambrose was so alive – always working, laughing, loving … his hands never still, always rolling a cigarette, or sketching a drawing or throwing back a glass of the harsh red wine he kept in two-litre bottles under the sink at the Mill – too rough for anyone else to drink.
Only an artist of the calibre of Ambrose himself could have captured all that life, the contradictions of his still concentration and restless energy, and the mysterious magnetic attraction of a man of very ordinary appearance.
But he never made a self-portrait. Or not that I know of. Ironic, really, when he drew anything and everything around him – the birds on the river, the girls at Salten House, the fragile marsh flowers that shivered and blew in the summer breeze, the ripple of wind on the Reach …
He drew Kate obsessively, littering the house with sketches of her eating, swimming, sleeping, playing … and later he drew me, and Thea, and Fatima, though he always asked our permission. I remember it still, his halting, slight gravelly voice, so like Kate’s. ‘Do you, um, mind if I draw you?’
And we never minded. Though maybe we should have.
One long sunny afternoon he drew me, sitting at the kitchen table with the strap of my dress falling from one shoulder, my chin in my hands, and my eyes fixed on him. And I can still remember the feel of the sun on my cheek, and the heat of my gaze upon him, and the little electric shock that happened every single time he glanced up at my face from his sketch, and our eyes met.
He gave me the drawing, but I don’t know what happened to it. I gave it to Kate, because there was nowhere to hide it at school, and it didn’t feel right to show my parents, or the girls at Salten House. They would not have understood. No one would have understood.
After his disappearance there were whispers – his past, his drug convictions, the fact that he didn’t have a single teaching qualification to his name. That first day though, I knew none of this. I had no idea of the part that Ambrose would play in our lives, and we in his, or how the ripples of our meeting would go on reverberating down the years. I just stood, holding the strap of my bag and panting, as he straightened from his position, hunched over a pupil’s easel. He looked across at me with those blue, blue eyes, and he smiled, a smile that crinkled the skin above his beard, and at the corners of his eyes.
‘Hello,’ he said kindly, putting down the borrowed brush and wiping his hands on his painter’s apron. ‘I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Ambrose.’
I opened my mouth, but no words came out. It was something about the intensity of his gaze. The way you could believe, in the moment that he looked at you, that he cared, utterly and completely. That there was no one else in the universe who mattered to him as much as you did. That you were alone, in a crowded room.
‘I’m … I’m Isa,’ I said at last. ‘Isa Wilde.’
‘I’m Fatima,’ Fatima said. She dropped her bag to the floor with a little thump, and I saw her looking around, as full of wonder as I was at this Aladdin’s cave of treasures, so different from the plainness of the rest of the school.
‘Well, Fatima,’ Ambrose said, ‘Isa, I am very pleased to meet you.’
He took my hand in his, but he didn’t shake it, as I’d expected. Instead he pressed my fingers between his, a kind of clasp, as if we were promising each other something. His hands were warm and strong, and there was paint so deeply engrained into the lines of his knuckles and the grooves around his nails that I could see no amount of scrubbing could ever remove it.
‘Now,’ he said, waving a hand to the room behind him. ‘Come in. Pick an easel. And most important, make yourselves at home.’
And we did.
Ambrose’s classes were different, we learned that straight away. At first it was the obvious things I noticed – that Ambrose answered to his first name, that none of the girls were wearing ties or blazers, for example.
‘Nothing worse than a tie dragging across your watercolour,’ he said that first day as he invited us to take them off. But it was more than that – something other than straight practicality. A loosening of formality. A space, a much needed space, to breathe, in amongst all the sterile conformity of Salten House.
In class he was a professional – in spite of all the girls who ‘pashed’ on him, unbuttoning their shirts to the point where you could see their bras, as they reached across the canvas. He kept his distance – physically, as well as metaphorically. That first day, when he saw me struggling with my sketch, he came and stood behind me, and I had a sharp memory of my old art mistress, Miss Driver, who used to lean over her students’ shoulders to make alterations, so that you could feel the heat of her pressed against your spine, and smell her sweat.
Ambrose by contrast stood his distance, a foot behind me, silent and contemplative, looking from my page up to the mirror I had propped on the table in front of my easel. We were doing self-portraits.
‘It’s crap, isn’t it?’ I said hopelessly. And then I bit my tongue, expecting a reprimand for the bad language. But Ambrose didn’t even seem to notice. He just stood, his eyes narrowed, seeming hardly to notice me at all, his whole attention fixed on the paper. I held out the pencil, expecting him to draw in corrections like Miss Driver. He took it, almost absently, but he didn’t make a mark on the page. Instead he turned to look at me.
‘It’s not crap,’ he said seriously. ‘But you’re not looking, you’re drawing what you think is there. Look. Really look at yourself in the mirror.’
I turned, trying hard to look at myself, and not at Ambrose’s lined, weathered face standing over my shoulder. All I saw was flaws – the spots on my chin, the hint of baby fat around the jaw, the way my unruly flyaway hair wisped out from the elastic band.
‘The reason it’s not coming together is because you’re drawing the features, not the person. You’re more than a collection of frown lines and doubts. The person I see when I look at you …’ He stopped, and I waited, feeling his eyes on me, trying not to squirm beneath the intensity of his gaze. ‘I see someone brave,’ he said at last. ‘I see someone who’s trying very hard. I see someone who’s nervous, but stronger than she knows. I see someone who’s worried, but doesn’t need to be.’
I felt my cheeks flame, but the words, which would have been unbearably corny coming from anyone else, somehow sounded matter-of-fact, when delivered in Ambrose’s gravelled voice.
‘Draw that,’ he said. He handed the pencil back to me, and his face broke into a smile, crinkling his cheeks, and drawing lines at the corners of his eyes as if someone had sketched them in there and then. ‘Draw the person I see.’
I could find nothing to say. I only nodded.
I can hear his voice in my head now, clipped and husky, so like Kate’s. Draw the person I see.
I still have that drawing somewhere, and it shows a girl whose face is open to the world, a girl with nothing to hide but her own insecurities. But that person, the person Ambrose saw and believed in, she doesn’t exist any more.
Perhaps she never did.