The Matisse Stories

He was always late to their appointment, to all appointments. The salon was full of whisking young things, male and female, and he stopped to speak to all of them, to all the patient sitters, with their questing, mirror-bound stares. The telephone rang perpetually. She sat on a rosy foamy pouffe and read in a glossy magazine, Her Hair, an article at once solemnly portentous and remorselessly jokey (such tones are common) about the hairdresser as the new healer, with his cure of souls.Once, the magazine informed her, the barber had been the local surgeon, had drawn teeth, set bones and dealt with female problems. Now in the rush of modern alienated life, the hairdresser performed the all-important function of listening. He elicited the tale of your troubles and calmed you.Lucían did not. He had another way. He created his own psychiatrist and guru from his captive hearer. Or at least, so Susannah found, who may have been specially selected because she was plump, which could be read as motherly, and because, as a university teacher she was, as he detected, herself a professional listener. He asked her advice.‘I don’t see myself shut in here for the next twenty years. I want more out of life. Life has to have a meaning. I tried Tantric Art and the School of Meditation. Do you know about that sort of thing, about the inner life?’His fingers flicked and flicked in her hair, he compressed a ridge and scythed it.‘Not really. I’m an agnostic.’‘I’d like to know about art. You know about art. You know about that pink nude, don’t you? How do I find out?’She told him to read Lawrence Gowing, and he clamped the tress he was attending to, put down his scissors, and wrote it all down in a little dove-grey leather book. She told him where to find good extra-mural classes and who was good among the gallery lecturers.Next time she came it was not art, it was archaeology. There was no evidence that he had gone to the galleries or read the books.‘The past pulls you,’ he said. ‘Bones in the ground and gold coins in a hoard, all that. I went down to the City and saw them digging up the Mithraic temples. There’s a religion, all that bull’s blood, dark and light, fascinating.’She wished he would tidy her head and be quiet. She could recognise the flitting mind, she considered. It frightened her. What she knew, what she cared about, what was coherent, was separate shards for him to flit over, remaining separate. You wrote books and gave lectures, and these little ribbons of fact shone briefly and vanished.‘I don’t want to put the best years of my life into making suburban old dears presentable,’ he said. ‘I want something more.’‘What?’ she said, meeting his brooding stare above the wet mat of her mop. He puffed foam into it and said, ‘Beauty, I want beauty. I must have beauty. I want to sail on a yacht among the Greek isles, with beautiful people.’ He caught her eye. ‘And see those temples and those sculptures.’ He pressed close, he pushed at the nape of her neck, her nose was near his discreet zip.‘You’ve been washing it without conditioner,’ he said. ‘You aren’t doing yourself any good. I can tell.’She bent her head submissively, and he scraped the base of her skull.‘You could have highlights,’ he said in a tone of no enthusiasm. ‘Bronze or mixed autumnal.’‘No thanks. I prefer it natural.’He sighed.