After Bathing at Baxters by D. J. Taylor Read Free Book Online

there’s any call for that kind of remark,’ he said absently.
    Julian had little experience of women in early middle age, let alone artistic ones. Mrs Arkwright, the school’s art department, specialised in Norfolk landscapes populated by vast, Stubbsian horses. A spinster friend of his mother’s routinely dispensed faded, self-painted watercolours as Christmas presents. Miss Hoare, etching in the corners of her tumultuous seascapes, seemed infinitely removed from these pale exemplars. She painted putting courses filled with giant golfers waving their irons like weapons, a vortex of wind, debris and flailing black birds descending on the spire of St Peter’s church. ‘You can be honest with me,’ she told Julian. ‘Do you like them?’ ‘I don’t dis like them,’ Julian replied truthfully. ‘But in the sea picture you’ve put the gulls in the wrong place. You see, they always alight on the highest point.’ Miss Hoare was delighted. ‘A very good answer,’ she said. ‘If you’d said you liked them, I wouldn’t have believed you.’
    Conscious of their roles as native and interloper, they strolled around the town in search of vantage points: the gallery of the church, the high ground to the north, the tiny station with its dozing porter. ‘Why Sheringham?’ Julian asked at one point. ‘I mean …’ He stopped for a second, crimson-faced. ‘I thought artists went to the South of France, places like that.’ ‘So they do,’ Miss Hoare said judiciously. ‘But my dear, I’ve had enough of Menton and Nice to last me a lifetime. Full of hopeless Englishmen thinking they’re Pierre Loti.’ Reaching the front again, they turned into the high street. Here the characteristic high summer smells hung in the air: fried fish, candyfloss, oil, each mixed with the pervasive tang of salt. ‘Do you suppose,’ Miss Hoare wondered, ‘there is anywhere we could get a drink? A proper drink, that is.’ ‘Not a chance,’ Julian told her cheerfully. ‘Everyone knows I’ve only just turned sixteen. If I went into a pub and ordered a half of cider they’d probably telephone my father.’ ‘Oh well, if that’s the difficulty,’ said Miss Hoare. At the bar of the Saracen’s Head she loomed brazenly above a knot of Summer People in khaki shorts and sunhats and announced: ‘Two glasses of white wine. And this young man is my nephew.’ Later, as they sat in an alcove looking out over the humped keels of upended crab boats, she said: ‘Will it matter? Saying you’re my nephew, I mean.’ ‘I shouldn’t think my father will be very pleased.’ ‘Will he find out?’ ‘Oh, I expect someone will tell him,’ Julian told her, elated by the wine and not caring very much. ‘They usually do.’
    August came, with flaring skies. An old man had a heart attack on the beach, and an air-sea rescue helicopter came to ferry him away. The O-level results were due in a week. ‘Exams,’ Miss Hoare pronounced, ‘are the curse of the educated classes.’ They were in the Saracen’s Head again, whose staff, curiously, had yet to complain to Mr Holroyd. ‘Are you still set on Art?’ She enunciated it as one would the name of a favourite relative or a honeymoon destination. ‘I don’t know,’ Julian wondered, realising that for all his disparagement of mathematics, physics, chemistry and the dreary people who taught them, he really did not know. ‘There’s an art school at Norwich,’ he explained. ‘Or even at Lowestoft. And then …’ Miss Hoare beamed back at him. Reckoning up the number of glasses of white wine she had consumed, Julian calculated it at six or perhaps seven. ‘You must lend me those sketchbooks of yours,’ she said. ‘Let me look at them and see what can be