Room 2D

Photo-story from Janus 35 The scene was a large block of flats in the more affluent part of London’s West End. On the seventh and top floor the nine-feet-wide corridor was almost deserted. Almost but not quite. At the far end, silhouetted against the soft glow of a pseudo-Regency standard lamp crouched the figure of an elderly man whose features were entirely obscured by a black Homburg hat. The collar of his expensive Astrakhan fur coat was turned up and completed a sinister anonymity which was enhanced by the ominous posture. For ten minutes the man did not bodily move. Occasionally though, his eyelashes flickered. This movement was not caused by the abnormality of his posture but by the discomforting draught which came from the keyhole that was in close proximity to his eye. The subjects of the peeping eye were two 20-year-old girls who found their very presence in the rather bare room excitingly amusing. Andrea and Josie had...

From Blushes 34 Her peers at school had always told Charlotte how brilliant she was at ‘art’ — and the quality of her life drawings had inevitably extracted praise from her teachers, even when she was younger. Now she’d taken the plunge and, instead of opting for university, she had decided to attend a particularly good art college on the south coast near Brighton. Despite the tough competition for entry, Charlotte — or Charlie as she was known to most of her friends — sailed through and was immediately put under the wing of the most talented teacher at the college, John Mitchley. A man with numerous exhibitions to his credit, John drove his students hard, and liked to stretch their talents to the limit in his search for excellence. Occasionally; he had a small number of students to his lovely home on the hills above and outside Brighton, where they would paint, draw, and simply talk about their interest in art. For Charlotte,...