The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [62]
Outside on the street, we all three blinked under the impact of fresh air. After a moment, a man came out of the Café and pressed an object into my hand—the bag containing the skirt and blouse that I had put on in Sussex many long hours before. I thanked him, but he vanished before I could find a coin for him, and I joined my two companions as they turned up Regent Street, braced together against the sway of the pavement. My own feet meandered uncertainly, but once my ears stopped ringing and the stinging sensation in my eyes cleared, I discovered that it was a very pleasant evening.
Alice talked at me over her shoulder, in tones that reached those in the buildings around us as well. She was a modern sculptress, she said, providing a woman's perspective to the most male bastion of all the arts. Her main problem, apart from the disinclination of the art world to treat women seriously, was finding a studio large enough to contain her vision. When we reached their home and studio, half a mile away in Soho, I saw what she meant.
The garret she worked in, four sagging flights up from street level, was intended to house servants, not to support a ton and a half of scrap iron. I started to follow the two inside, then spotted the object in the middle of the floor and stopped dead. Surely it was my imagination that put such a dip to the floorboards?
“I call it ‘Freedom,’” Alice told me with pride. The sculpture appeared to have some vague representational basis, but whether the extremities were the arms of a number of women strewing chicken feed, or the legs of war horses, I could not tell.
“It's autobiographical,” Ronnie added. “Where's the corkscrew?” Since he was pawing through a drawer at the question, I thought he was not asking about a component of the sculpture.
“Bunny was using it this morning to score the pots before she put them in the kiln.”
Lord, a kiln as well? “Are there people underneath us?” I asked.
“Just Bunny, and she won't hear us,” Alice assured me, which hadn't at all been what I was asking.
“How …” I stopped, at a loss for words.
“How am I going to get it out? The back wall is merely brick and tin, I'll invite a bunch of friends over to bash out a hole and help lower it down.” She seemed proud that she had already solved that problem.
“Honestly, are there people living below? Because I really don't think the floorboards are sturdy enough to support your … vision.”
This struck the two as funny, and they began to giggle. Ronnie set off across the room, aiming for a bottle that sat on a long, high work-table, only to have his orbit pulled towards the monumental piece of art—no, the dip in the boards had not been my imagination.
“We're the only ones here, us and Bunny,” Alice finally answered. “She owns the building, in fact, although her father is taking her to court to force her to sell it to cover some bills. But if the old man succeeds, we've told him he'll have to knock it down with us inside.”
It didn't look to me as if he'd have to wait for the end of a court case to see the demolition of the building, but I was relieved that there were no families sleeping beneath us.
“I'm not altogether certain I don't own the building,” Ronnie said, addressing the bottle with whose cork he had begun to wrestle.
“The law is so patriarchal,” Alice commented to me.
“Er,” I said.
“The husband has rights to his wife's possessions,” she explained.
“So, Ronnie is married to Bunny?”
“Bunny isn't her name, of course,” Alice said blithely. “We called her that after she proved so enthusiastic about—”
“Alice!” Ronnie chided.
She giggled again, and finished the sentence. “—about reproducing. Three children in four years indicates a certain enthusiasm, don't you think? But yes, she and Ronnie and I are married. Does that shock you?”
I was not about to confess to any shock at the doctrines of free love, but I did