Double Vision by Pat Barker Page B

that often Kate would forget he was there, and then be startled when something moved on the periphery of her vision.
    That changed when the figure began to take shape. She was familiar with this process: the sense, growing stronger by the hour, as she built up, carved, cut back, built up, carved again, of another presence in the room. The decisive moment came when it – he – acquired a face. With some amusement she noticed how Peter’s posture changed. Before, he’d stood easily with his back to the armature. Now he opened his shoulders when he was talking to her, as people do who feel the need to include another person in the group.
    He noticed her observing this, and said, with a little self-conscious laugh, ‘I keep feeling I ought to speak to him. It seems rude to ignore him.’
    He’d become fascinated by the process, or by the figure perhaps, by what it represented. Either way he was no longer the impersonal, passive assistant. Now,every day, he brought his brain as well as his muscles to the task, and that didn’t make it easy to maintain the clarity of her own conception. She was always aware of his mind pushing against hers, in the silence.
    It’s in the nature of plaster that you have to work fast. It forces decisiveness on you, and yet there were many times now when she had to wait to be helped. Between the decision and the action, there was this hiatus, while she waited for him to mix the plaster, or hand the chisel up to her. Once, worn out and in great pain, she had to let him apply the plaster, and that was a small death. She watched his hands stroke it on, and told herself it didn’t matter who applied the plaster as long as she, and she alone, did the carving.
    Only it did matter. Her grasp on the figure had become tentative – ‘fluid’, if you wanted to sound positive about the situation, but then ‘fluid’ wasn’t the way she worked. Normally she had the conception clear in her head from the beginning, so that the process of carving seemed almost like the uncovering of a figure already there, waiting to be released. Peter had destroyed that. Sometimes she looked down from the scaffold and saw him standing below, and his fingers would begin to twitch and she knew he was imagining the chisel in his own hands.
    Her attitude to him changed. Previously she’d said almost nothing to him, apart from a brief greeting in the morning, a comment on the weather – once they’d started work, not even that. And, whether because his own inclination accorded with hers, or because he wasadept at picking up what other people wanted, he had been resolutely impersonal.
    But now those twitching hands made her curious. Had he, she asked, any artistic ambitions himself? No, he said, not art, he was no use at that. He wanted to be a writer. Even this admission, which was hardly intimate, had to be dragged out of him. He made her feel she was being intrusive, though the question was natural enough in the circumstances, and scarcely intimate. ‘So that’s why you do gardening? To support the writing?’
    ‘Yes. I could teach, but –’
    ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘The trouble with teaching is you’re using the same part of your mind. It’s creative if you’re doing it properly. Worst possible job for an artist. Or a writer I suppose.’
    ‘And not just that. It’s so circular. I did an MA in creative writing and most of the people on the course were going to teach it.’ That rare charming smile again. ‘Anyway, I enjoy gardening. I like doing things with my hands.’
    Kate found that conversation reassuring. It was a situation she could easily identify with: doing odd jobs, scratching a living, because the one thing you wanted to do couldn’t be made to pay. It put him into a context she could understand. She’d done jobs like that as a student – waitressing, bar work, hotel work, anything – and for a number of years afterwards. She felt she knew him better. But then it was back to the long hours of