The Italian Teacher(51)
“Canadian.”
“See? I didn’t even know.”
“Back when I used to teach, I always—”
“You were a teacher?”
“Only during my doctorate. Very junior classes on art history, plus Italian.”
“So you qualified as a doctor too?”
“Not the useful kind. Not the kind that absterges.” Flushed from lager and expectation, he looks directly at her. From his perspective, she has experienced a life so much fuller than his: raised three younger sisters and a brother; married a hard drinker, whom she supported by working as a cutter at a garment factory, where blokes gave the girls cuddles, like it or not; got divorced when Ben’s boozing became too much; moved down here to London. By contrast, Pinch’s life—so fumbling in his view—seems to Julie as sparkling and exotic as his foreign words.
“You’re my bit of posh,” she tells him. “And I’m your bit of rough.”
42
Pinch’s basement flat is small for two and would test another couple. But the better he knows Julie—her pudgy grin upon waking, her tone-deaf singing—the more Pinch is lifted from his crusty professorial manner. Often he praises her mind and criticizes the state education forced on her in childhood, implying that she could make more of herself. A person can still study at age thirty-four. When she enrolls at Birkbeck College, he deems this the relationship of his life—she esteems his view. After classes, Julie returns bubbling with big talk on big subjects, making insightful, innocent links among literature and sociology and philosophy. Listening rapt, Pinch feels his love galloping ahead. After a snotty man lampoons her question in class, Pinch orders her to ignore bullies like that. “You’re the smartest person there by miles. I promise, Jules.”
“He’s actually pretty clever. Always talking about everyone’s ‘subjectivity.’”
“Subjectivity is just an underhanded way to attack other people. I’m sure he is entirely objective, right? He’s preening for attention, I assure you.” Pinch stops, sheepish suddenly. “Sorry—I’m frothing at the mouth.”
“No, no, I’m enjoying the show.” She smiles.
“Enjoy this then.” He pulls up his shirt, slaps his gut. “Look at this monstrosity. How did I gain so much weight? I’ve become disgusting.”
“Yes, but you’re my disgusting,” she teases. “You know, I wouldn’t mind a big tummy.”
“They’re not hard to achieve. I call it the Maltesers diet.”
“Like a pregnant belly.”
“That’s a bit insulting!” he says, laughing, petering out as he digests her remark. Julie delayed a family because of her ex and his drinking. She lost years because of that, and doesn’t have endless time. He ponders the features of their child, but keeps seeing the daughter he’s previously imagined: a little Barrows. He pulls down his shirt. “When you’re further along with your degree, we can think of kids. If we took that step now, it’d be the end.”
“Not the end of steps. Just a different one,” she contends. “Charlie, don’t think that I know nothing because I don’t know Latin.”
“Julie, everyone I ever met who knew Latin, me especially, knows fuck-all.” He fetches a sausage roll from the fridge, eats standing, knowing why he rebuffed her. He loves Julie—but he isn’t sure he accepts her. She isn’t accomplished, isn’t expecting to become important, which reinforces that he isn’t, and won’t be. Wincing at his disloyalty, he shoves the sausage roll back into the fridge.
“Grumpy?” she asks.
“Just some work things on my mind.”
In the bathroom, he brushes his hair roughly across his balding pate, holds in his tummy as if an attractive stranger passed. He makes himself relax, looking directly at the reflection, jabbing his stomach with the toothbrush end, repelled by himself, needing Julie, though she is just on the other side of this door.
When her sister visits London, she wants to do a bit of Oxford Street window shopping without her kids, so Julie and Pinch take the two youngsters to the National Gallery, with Pinch acting as impromptu tour guide, pointing them toward famous paintings, explaining historical context, the tragedies and quirks of artists, embedded symbols, the technical choices that direct the eye or acknowledge predecessors. As Natalie once taught him at Galleria Borghese, he shows these kids to crouch before the pictures to catch a raking light, revealing outlines of the underpainting, where one discovers what the artists intended, in contrast to what they achieved. “And what a person intends is as important as what they achieve. Don’t you think?”
“Are those mushrooms, Uncle Charlie?” the eleven-year-old girl asks, pointing at the foreground of the Wilton Diptych.
“Good eye, Liz. They were long thought, by people less sharp than you, to be flowers. But they’ve since been identified as aniseed toadstools and milk-caps—very rare medieval depictions of mushrooms, which appear much more frequently after fifteen hundred.”
Bemused, the two kids run off to see a picture of soldiers fighting, and Julie goes with them.
Following after, Pinch considers her from behind, knowing her soft body beneath that dress, a secret knowledge—permission to her—that moves him, causes him to act sternly with the children at their next inquiry, because stern is the opposite of what he feels.