Free A Sight for Sore Eyes by Ruth Rendell

footstool. 'The whole family's breaking up,' he moaned. 'You'd best get down there and see your dad, you can come on the back of the bike with me and I'll drop you off on my way to Cricklewood.' 'No, thanks,' said Teddy. 'I'm busy.' The footstool would be beautiful, a creation of simple lines and smooth, gleaming surfaces. He closed his eyes, imagining a future life from which all ugliness was banished.
    Chapter 7
    Back at college a few days later, Teddy attended a lecture on the Joyden School. It was given by a visiting professor and he wasn't obliged or even expected to attend. 'Fine art' had no part in his course, but he admired the work of A'Lichael Joyden, Rosalind Smith and Simon Aipheton, samples of which he had seen reproduced in a Sunday supplement, and he wanted to hear what Professor Mills had to say about it. As always spotlessly dean, with newly washed hair and scrubbed fingernails, Teddy was dressed in his usual immaculate near-rags. He had no money for clothes and shopped, when he had to, at Oxfam and the Sue Ryder shop. His mother had always dressed him from these establishments, he was used to it and took no interest in what he wore. On this day he had on blue jeans, like everyone else in the lecture hail of the Potter Building, a snowy though shabby T-shirt and a dark-blue sweat-shirt that had been bought new from C & A by the Sue Ryder donor twelve years before. The girl who sat down next to him gave him one of those appraising looks he was accustomed to. She was pretty enough. He took virtually no interest in people's characteristics or attitudes or opinions, but he always noticed whether they were good-looking or the reverse. This one had a bright, sharp-featured face and a neat little body, but to use a phrase of his grandmother's, she looked shop-soiled. As if, he thought with an inner shudder, she had been through too many grubby hands and rumbled on too many beds as smelly as Keith's. 'Hi,' she said. He nodded at her. 'I haven't seen you here before.' He raised his swallow's-wing eyebrows. 'I'd remember you, believe me,' she said flirtatiously. 'There are some people you don't forget.' 'Is that so?' It was an interrogatory he often used and it meant very little. He forgot everyone except those he was obliged to be with in daily proximity. 'Tell me something.' She was smiling now. 'Anything!' 'How would you clean a ring?' 'What?' 'How would you clean a diamond ring?' 'For God's sake, I don't know.' She gave him a resentful glance, but seemed to be considering the question. She shrugged. 'My gran puts hers in gin. Leaves it in a glass of gin overnight.' The lecturer was coming on to the podium. 'Right,' he said. 'Thanks.' Teddy had wondered how Professor Mills would show examples of the paintings and not, he hoped, by sticking reproductions up on a board. To his relief he saw that slides were to be used. The lights in the auditorium were dimmed a little and the first picture appeared on the screen. It was Michael Joyden's Come Hither Blues and Teddy hadn't seen it before. The pop group with whom Joyden and Aipheton had been friends, and whose music they had loved, appeared on the canvas in swirls of colour and flashes of light, so that strangely you could almost hear the picture. The girl muttered something about not being able to see to make notes. Teddy ignored her. Professor Mills talked about Joyden and Smith and the influence of the Fauvists, their bold style and use of brilliant colour. While Rosalind Smith demonstrated this influence perhaps more than any other member of the Joyden School, Aipheton owed more to Bonnard, Vallotton and Vuillard than to Matisse and Rouault. Some called his wor1~ retrograde, but the lecturer claimed for it a striking modernity comparable at least to Hockney or Freud. Teddy barely knew who most of these people were. Lucien Freud he knew, but thought his work ugly, no matter how good it might be. He had seen a reproduction of one of Aipheton's paintings on a flier put