beneath my flared denim jeans and too-tight T-shirt worn under my genuine shaggy sheepskin overcoat and I hope she has got central heating. It occurs to me, as it always does when it is too late to do anything about it, that nothing has been said about posing in the nude. I might be landing myself with a two-hour stint of gazing at a bowl of fruit.
The door springs open and Mrs. C. is revealed, wearing what appears to be judo kit: baggy trousers and a kind of wrap-over waistcoat secured by a sash which matches the one holding back her hair. The action woman bit surprises me as I had been expecting a spot of the long cigarette holders and “Do come in, dahling.”
“Good,” she says. “I’m glad you’re punctual. I’m itching to get at you.” She smiles brightly and leads me through a couple of rooms furnished so that you expect to see John Betjeman standing on the mantelpiece.
“I’m afraid it’s a bit of a shambles where we’re going. Make sure you don’t step on a tube of paint.”
She opens a door in the wall next to what looks like the fiction section of Battersea Public Library and waves a hand at a welter of canvases, trestles and easels which appear in a room slightly smaller than the centre court at Wimbledon. She is not kidding about it being in a mess and it takes me a bit of time to pick out the canvas she intends to work on. This faces a low divan with a few rugs lying on it and is in front of a long mirror which covers one wall of the room.
“The artificial light is a damn nuisance,” she says, fiddling with a few switches. “But if I can sketch in a framework, perhaps you can come back when you have a free afternoon—or morning ideally.”
“I’ll try,” I say. “What do you want me to do?”
This is the sixty-four thousand dollar question and I don’t mind telling you that the sight of the divan has started a few naughty thoughts on a slow bicycle race round my mind.
“Well,” says Mrs. Carstairs slowly, “perhaps I should have told you this before, and I sort of tried to in a way; the particular subject I have in mind requires you to pose in the nude! I didn’t want to mention it right away in case you thought I was some kind of crank.”
When she leans forward to adjust a spotlight I notice that she is not wearing a bra, and I wonder what the rest of her breasts look like. Pretty good, I would reckon.
“That’s all right,” I hear myself saying. “What exactly do you want me to do?” I start to give her the famous Lea slow burn but she is still farting about with the lighting, so I decide to hold it for a couple of minutes.
“I’m going through a classical period at the moment,” she rambles on enthusiastically, “and I have a certain fondness for the Rape of Lucretia.”
Well, we all have our funny little ways, and who am I to point the finger at anybody?
“Oh, yes,” I say, with the easy nonchalance that has made me the toast of the Streatham Ice Rink. “Very nice.”
“Probably something very Freudian about it,” she gushes, “but one can’t help one’s id, can one?”
She is leaving me behind fast, but I smile graciously and start taking my shoes and socks off. She fills me in on the background: how this Roman gent called Tarquin fancied a married bint called Lucretia, who was one of the old-fashioned kind and told him to get stuffed, thus making him decidedly narky to the point where he rammed his nasty up her before she could put down her spaghetti bolognese, thus causing a good deal of ill-feeling all round.
It occurs to me that I am a certainty for the part of Tarquin but that unless the whole thing took place in his imagination, we are going to need a bird. No doubt Mrs. C. has thought of this and I look round hopefully for signs of my fellow model.
“Get on the couch,” says Mrs. C. “I want to make sure I’ve got the lighting right. You needn’t take off your pants yet. Oh, well, it doesn’t matter.”
I stretch out on the couch and she gives me a few instructions whilst sketching away with a piece of charcoal. Apparently satisfied, she pins up a new sheet and smiles at me encouragingly.
“Right, off we go,” she says, and to my amazement she starts to peel off the top part of her robe. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to put up with a rather uncomely Lucretia for a few moments.” Off come the baggy trousers and she is naked except for a tiny pair of panties. And they are on the floor in the time it takes me to write this.
“I daren’t ask any female I know to model in case they think I’m a lesbian,” she goes on, “so I have to do it all myself. That’s why the mirror is such a blessing. Now, let’s see. What shall we try first?”
She is standing beside the divan and her muff is practically tickling my nose. By the cringe, but she is a lovely bird. Ripe and curvy like a basket of pears just before they start attracting the flies.
“Let me lie down while you get on top of me,” she says.
It can’t be bad, can it? I swing my legs over the side of the divan and she snuggles down and tilts back her head.
“Hold my wrists. That’s right. Now bend them back so I look as if I’m being staked out over an anthill. Excellent.”
I imagine she does all this because she likes to live the part in order to get a bit of inspiration and I am about to give her some help when she turns her head to one side and twists away from me.
“Now stick your legs out as far as they will go and lie on top of me. Not bad. Not bad at all.”
She is looking away from me again and I suddenly realise she is studying the shape our bodies make in the mirror. Two more contortions and she leaps off the divan with everything shaking and starts hammering away with the charcoal.
“If you can remember that position it will be a big help,” she yammers. “I’m afraid I’m a bit of a painting-by-numbers expert, no imagination at all. I have to see what I’m doing. Oh dear. I can’t remember how that bit went. We’ll have to do it again.”
And she is over on the divan again with me on top and the faint smell of her perfume playing merry hell with my nostrils and her soft flesh kneading against mine and—
“I can’t go on!” I yelp.
Mrs. C. is surprised. “What’s the matter? Have you got cramp or something?”
“Mrs. Carstairs, you’re a very, very attractive woman. I can’t be as close to you as this without feeling that I want to make love to you—not ‘want’, have got to make love to you. It’s not fair to my nervous system.”
If Mrs. C. can’t feel Percy pressing forward hopefully, like a friendly killer shark, she must be dead from the waist down.
“Well, that is terribly flattering of you. I feel quite overcome. But are you sure? I mean, you’re a young man and I’m old enough to be your mother. Surely you don’t really find me appealing?”
“Put your hands between my legs if you don’t believe me,” I pant. “You’re lovely, gorgeous, fantastic, absobloodylutely marvellous.”
“You’re very naughty,” she says. “I’m not certain that I should encourage you.” What her right hand is doing would seem to contradict this. “Still, I’m incapable of resisting flattery and it might help to relax you, mightn’t it?”
“It might,” I murmur. “Oh, Mrs. Carstairs, it just might.”
“All right,” she says. “In the cause of art I will allow you to make love to me and also”—her fingers wind round the back of my neck and pull my mouth down on to hers—“because I want you to.”
That little incident with Mrs. Carstairs is the start of a whole series of classical paintings we collaborate on, all of which seem to require