The Matisse Stories

Shona McRury has topaz eyes and long, silky brown hair, like a huge ribbon, caught up at the back with a tortoiseshell comb. She wears topaz ear-rings, little spheres on gold chains, that exactly match her eyes, and an olive silk suit, with a loose jacket and a pleated skirt, over a lemon-yellow silk shirt, all of which tone in impeccably with her eyes. (Debbie who is now a professional in these matters sees immediately how the whole delicate and powerful effect is constructed around the eyes, reinforced by a subtle powdering of olive and gold shadow shot with a sharper green, almost malachite.) She climbs up to Robin’s attic on dark-green lizard-skin shoes. Between the lizard skin and the olive silk are slightly golden metallic stockings on legs not quite beautiful, too thin, too straight. Robin goes first, then Shona McRury, then Debbie, then Mrs Brown, with a bottle of chilled Sauvignon and three glasses on a Japanese lacquer tray. Mrs Brown is wearing her bird-of-paradise upholstery trousers and a patchwork shirt in rainbow colours, stitched together with red feather-stitching. Although she has not brought herself a glass, she positions herself inside the studio door for the showing, and makes no attempt to go away, staring with sombre interest at Shona McRury’s elegance and Robin’s canvases.Debbie has not decided whether to leave Robin alone with Shona McRury, or to stay and put in a word here and there. Mrs Brown’s odd behaviour decides her, and is perhaps altogether too decisive. It is not in Debbie ‘s power to say anything like, ‘You may go now, Mrs Brown,’ but she can say to her, ‘Come on, let’s leave them to it,’ so she does, and she and Mrs Brown go downstairs together.Shona McRury prowls in Robin’s studio in her topaz ear-rings and lizard shoes. She rearranges the fetishes absentmindedly, rattling the Monet dish in its saucer. Robin puts up a series of paintings of the fetishes on different backgrounds, in different numbers, in different lights. White silk like a glacier, crumpled newspaper, dark boards, pale boards. Her mouth is large and soft and brown. She lights a cigarette. She says, ‘I like that,’ and ‘I like that,’ and nothing else for a bit, and then begins to read the paintings as allegories. ‘They’re modern vanitases, I see,’ says Shona McRury, ‘they’re about the littleness of our life.’ Robin tries to keep quiet. He cannot overbear her as if she were Mrs Brown, he cannot tell her that they are not about littleness but about the infinite terror of the brilliance of colour, of which he could almost die, he doesn’t think those things in words anyway. He does at first say things like, ‘Hmn, well, this one is solving a different kind of problem, d’you see?’ and then he doesn’t say anything because he can see she doesn’t see, she isn’t the slightest bit interested in the fact that the pictures, of which there are a very large number, never repeat, though they are all in a sense the same, they never set themselves exactly the same problem. She doesn’t see that. She says, ‘It’s a bit frightening, a bit depressing, all that empty space, isn’t it, it reminds you of coffins and bare kitchen tables with no food, no sustenance, all those bare boards, don’t they?’‘I don’t think of it that way,’ says Robin.‘How do you think of it?’‘Well, as a series of problems, really, inexhaustible problems, of light and colour, you know.’He does not say, because he does not articulate, the sense he has that he is allowed his patch of brilliance because he has dutifully and accurately and even beautifully painted all these null and neutral tones, the doves, the dusts, the dead leaves.‘Do you have any inkling of a change of direction, a next phase coming up, you know, a new focus of interest, anything like that?’‘I think if I had a big show—if it were all on show together, all the different—hm—aspects—hm—solutions, so to speak, temporary solutions—I might want to—move on to something else. It’s hard to imagine, really.’‘Is it?’He does not see how crucial this little question is. Oh yes. One thing at a time. I seem to have my work cut out, cut out, you know, for me, as it were, yes.’Shona McRury says, ‘All those prints of lonely deckchairs in little winds, in gardens and on beaches. When you see the first, you think, how moving, how interesting. And when you see the tenth, or the twentieth, you think, oh, another solitary deckchair with a bit of wind in it, what else is there? You know?’‘I think so.’‘I can see your work isn’t like that.’‘Oh no. Not at all like that.’‘But it might look like that. To the uneducated eye.’‘Might it?’‘It might.’