Read Online Little Bits of Baby by Patrick Gale - Free Book Online

merely felt good so would frequently return with an armful of plain foliage, ripped from someone’s shrubbery as often as honestly bought.
    The studio walls were crowded with Faber’s huge, gaunt canvases; the unsold, piercing first drafts of portraits of generous friends, rich acquaintance, or interesting strangers. Most recently he had invited in a trio of female drunks. He had passed them every day for months where they sat by the Temperance drinking fountain, and without fail they hailed him,
    â€˜Wotcha blacky!’
    â€˜Is it true – you know – what they say about black guys’ winkles?’
    â€˜Ere!’ Ain’tcha got lovely skin, then?’
    â€˜Ooh! Can I touch too?’
    He would smile widely and there usually followed a brief exchange about the weather, the litter in the park or the fact that the Temperance fountain had dried up. One morning a few weeks ago they had complained in unison about the unbearable heat and he had asked them if, in return for a cold beer, a fiver each and a few hours in a big cool room, they would let him immortalise them in paint. He had quite forgotten inviting Andrea for lunch, so she was astonished to arrive, flowers in hand, to find him sketching and photographing the garrulous, unwashed threesome who were arranged on the dining-table. Mercifully it was not to be a nude study, not wholly. The sketches and photographs were now pinned at random on a broad piece of pinboard in a corner. The first three paintings taken from them hung on ropes from the central beams. The fourth, had not progressed beyond the head and shoulders of the central figure; a lean, tallow-skinned woman called Winnie. She was throwing back her head to laugh, revealing her chicken neck and gold tooth.
    The main wall, its base littered with a jumble of leaning canvases and empty frames, was ruled by Faber’s favourite work to date: a huge charcoal drawing he had made for a portrait of the breakfast broadcaster Candida Thackeray with her baby son. He had known her sister-in-law at art college and this generous commission had come a few months after Candida’s buying one of his sketches at the graduate show there. It was a marked contrast to her sharp, public image and caught a momentary expression almost of pain as she stared down at the baby in her grasp. Even had Andrea not told him first, he gathered from the newspapers that Ms Thackeray (alias Browne) had just been delivered of a bouncing baby girl. The hopes he entertained of a repeat commission were only faint; the Brownes were notoriously fashion-conscious and unlikely to repeat themselves.
    Elsewhere there was not a vertical surface unillustrated. The walls of the kitchen cupboards, where some fathers might have stuck their daughter’s adventures in poster paint or potato printing, were papered with newspaper cuttings interspersed with carefully selected postcards of morning-after gratitude or kitsch ones of holiday smugness. The bathroom walls were hung with a variety of mirrors and among the often unframed landscapes and still lifes on the galleried landing were plaster casts of Iras’s left hand and left foot, made on her every birthday since her arrival and placed on a shelf within her grasp. Faber’s bedroom was devoted to sleep and death. Mainly sleep. There was a painting he had made of Iras asleep on the grass with a book and a cushion. He had a collection of prints and paintings of sleeping figures (and occasionally dead ones) hung there, and a skull on his bedside table which served as a bookend. The latter had come away from its skeletal body when Iras had been allowed one cherry brandy two many last Christmas and tried her hand at a danse macabre . The headless remainder was now elegantly draped in black watered silk and arranged in a broken corner of the studio.
    Iras suffered all this visual prejudice in good part, regarding it as a weakness of Faber’s to be humoured and foreborne.