The Matisse Stories

Any two people may be talking to each other, at any moment, in a civilised way about something trivial, or something, even, complex and delicate. And inside each of the two there runs a kind of dark river of unconnected thought, of secret fear, or violence, or bliss, hoped-for or lost, which keeps pace with the flow of talk and is neither seen nor heard. And at times, one or both of the two will catch sight or sound of this movement, in himself, or herself, or, more rarely, in the other. And it is like the quick slip of a waterfall into a pool, like a drop into darkness. The pace changes, the weight of the air, though the talk may run smoothly onwards without a ripple or quiver.Gerda Himmelblau is back in the knot of quiet terror which has grown in her private self like a cancer over the last few years. She remembers, which she would rather not do, but cannot now control, her friend Kay, sitting in a heavy hospital armchair covered with mock-hide, wearing a long white hospital gown, fastened at the back, and a striped towelling dressing-gown. Kay is not looking at Gerda. Her mouth is set, her eyes are sleepy with drugs. On the white gown are scarlet spots of fresh blood, where needles have injected calm into Kay. Gerda says, ‘Do you remember, we are going to the concert on Thursday?’ and Kay says, in a voice full of stumbling ill-will, ‘No, I don’t, what concert?’ Her eyes flicker, she looks at Gerda and away, there is something malign and furtive in her look. Gerda has loved only one person in her life, her schoolfriend, Kay. Gerda has not married, but Kay has—Gerda was bridesmaid—and Kay has brought up three children. Kay was peaceful and kindly and interested in plants, books, cakes, her husband, her children, Gerda. She was Gerda’s anchor of sanity in a harsh world. As a young woman Gerda was usually described as ‘nervous’ and also as ‘lucky to have Kay Leverett to keep her steady’. Then one day Kay’s eldest daughter was found hanging in her father’s shed. A note had been left, accusing her schoolfellows of bullying. This death was not immediately the death of Kay—these things are crueller and slower. But over the years, Kay’s daughter’s pain became Kay’s, and killed Kay. She said to Gerda once, who did not hear, who remembered only later, ‘I turned on the gas and lay in front of the fire all afternoon, but nothing happened,’ She ‘fell’ from a window, watering a window-box. She was struck a glancing blow by a bus in the street. ‘I just step out now and close my eyes,’ she told Gerda, who said don’t be silly, don’t be unfair to busdrivers. Then there was the codeine overdose. Then the sleeping-pills, hoarded with careful secrecy. And a week after Gerda saw her in the hospital chair, the success, that is to say, the real death.The old Chinese woman clears the meal, the plates veiled with syrupy black-bean sauce, the unwanted cold rice-grains, the uneaten mange-touts.Gerda remembers Kay saying, earlier, when her pain seemed worse and more natural, and must have been so much less, must have been bearable in a way:‘I never understood how anyone could. And now it seems so clear, almost the only possible thing to do, do you know?’‘No, I don’t,’ Gerda had said, robust. ‘You cant do that to other people. You have no right.’ ‘I suppose not,’ Kay had said, ‘but it doesn’t feel like that.’ ‘I shan’t listen to you,’ Gerda had said. ‘Suicide can’t be handed on.’But it can. She knows now. She is next in line. She has flirted with lumbering lorries, a neat dark figure launching herself blindly into the road. Once, she took a handful of pills, and waited to see if she would wake up, which she did, so on that day she continued, drowsily nauseated, to work as usual. She believes the impulse is wrong, to be resisted. But at the time it is white, and clear, and simple. The colour goes from the world, so that the only stain on it is her own watching mind. Which it would be easy to wipe away. And then there would be no more pain.She looks at Perry Diss who is looking at her. His eyes are half-closed, his expression is canny and watchful. He has used her secret image, the white room, accurately; they have shared it. He knows that she knows, and what is more, she knows that he knows. How he knows, or when he discovered, does not matter. He has had a long life. His young wife was killed in an air-raid. He caused scandals, in his painting days, with his relations with models, with young respectable girls who had not previously been models. He was the co-respondent in a divorce case full of dirt and hatred and anguish. He was almost an important painter, but probably not quite. At the moment his work is out of fashion. He is hardly treated seriously. Like Gerda Himmelblau he carries inside himself some chamber of ice inside which sits his figure of pain, his version of kind Kay thick-spoken and malevolent in a hospital hospitality-chair.The middle-aged Chinese man brings a plate of orange segments. They are bright, they are glistening with juice, they are packed with little teardrop sacs full of sweetness. When Perry Diss offers her the oranges she sees the old scars, well-made efficient scars, on his wrists. He says,Oranges are the real fruit of Paradise, I always think. Matisse was the first to understand orange, don’t you agree? Orange in light, orange in shade, orange on blue, orange on green, orange in black—‘I went to see him once, you know, after the war, when he was living in that apartment in Nice. I was full of hope in those days, I loved him and was enraged by him and meant to outdo him, some time soon, when I had just learned this and that—which I never did. He was ill then, he had come through this terrible operation, the nuns who looked after him called him “le ressuscité”.‘The rooms in that apartment were shrouded in darkness. The shutters were closed, the curtains were drawn. I was terribly shocked—I thought he lived in the light, you know, that was the idea I had of him. I blurted it out, the shock, I said, “Oh, how can you bear to shut out the light?” And he said, quite mildly, quite courteously, that there had been some question of him going blind. He thought he had better acquaint himself with the dark. And then he added, “and anyway, you know, black is the colour of light”. Do you know the painting La Porte noire} It has a young woman in an armchair quite at ease in a peignoir striped in lemon and cadmium and … over a white dress with touches of cardinal red—her hair is yellow ochre and scarlet—and at the side is the window and the coloured light and behind—above—is the black door. Almost no one could paint the colour black as he could. Almost no one.’Gerda Himmelblau bites into her orange and tastes its sweetness. She says,‘He wrote, “I believe in God when I work.”’‘I think he also said, “I am God when I work.” Perhaps he is—not my God, but where—where I find that. I was brought up in the hope that I would be a priest, you know. Only I could not bear a religion which had a tortured human body hanging from the hands over its altars. No, I would rather have The Dance’Gerda Himmelblau is gathering her things together. He continues,‘That is why I meant what I said, when I said that young woman’s—muck-spreading—offended what I called sacred. What are we to do? I don’t want her to—to punish us by self-slaughter—nor do I wish to be seen to condone the violence—the absence of work—’Gerda Himmelblau sees, in her mind’s eye, the face of Peggi Nollett, potato-pale, peering out of a white box with cunning, angry eyes in the slit between puffed eyelids. She sees golden oranges, rosy limbs, a voluptuously curved dark blue violin-case, in a black room. One or the other must be betrayed. Whatever she does, the bright forms will go on shining in the dark. She says,‘There is a simple solution. What she wants, what she has always wanted, what the Department has resisted, is a sympathetic supervisor—Tracey Avison, for instance—who shares her way of looking at things—whose beliefs—who cares about political ideologies of that kind—who will—’‘Who will give her a degree and let her go on in the way she is going on. It is a defeat.’Oh yes. It is a question of how much it matters. To you. To me. To the Department. To Peggi Nollett, too.’‘It matters very much and not at all,’ says Perry Diss. ‘She may see the light. Who knows?’They leave the restaurant together. Perry Diss thanks Dr Himmelblau for his food and for her company. She is inwardly troubled. Something has happened to her white space, to her inner ice, which she does not quite understand. Perry Diss stops at the glass box containing the lobster, the crabs, the scallops—these last now decidedly dead, filmed with an iridescent haze of imminent putrescence. The lobster and the crabs are all still alive, all, more slowly, hissing their difficult air, bubbling, moving feet, feelers, glazing eyes. Inside Gerda Himmelblau’s ribs and cranium she experiences, in a way, the pain of alien fish-flesh contracting inside an exo-skeleton. She looks at the lobster and the crabs, taking accurate distant note of the loss of gloss, the attenuation of colour.‘I find that absolutely appalling, you know,’ says Perry Diss. ‘And at the same time, exactly at the same time, I don’t give a damn? D’you know?’‘I know,’ says Gerda Himmelblau. She does know. Cruelly, imperfectly, voluptuously, clearly. The muzak begins again. ‘Oh what a beautiful morning. Oh what a beautiful day’ She reaches up, in a completely uncharacteristic gesture, and kisses Perry Diss’s soft cheek.‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘For everything.’‘Look after yourself,’ says Perry Diss.‘Oh,’ says Gerda Himmelblau. ‘I will. I will.’