The Matisse Stories

by A. S. Byatt

  On Debbie’s walls, which are lemon-coloured, are photographs of Natasha and Jamie as naked babies, and later, gap-toothed, grinning school heads and shoulders, a series of very small woodcuts, illustrating fairy tales, a mermaid, an old witch with a spindle, a bear and two roses, and in a quite different style a small painting of a table, a hyper-realist wooden table with a blue vase and a small Rubik’s cube on it. Also, in white frames, two paintings done by a younger Natasha, a vase of anemones, watery crimsons and purples, a dress flung over a chair, blue dress, grey chair, promising folds, in a probably unintentional void.

  Debbie types, and cocks her head for the sound of the doorbell. She types ‘a peculiarly luscious new purple, like bilberry juice with a little cream swirled in it’. She jumps at the sound not of the doorbell but of her telephone, one of the new fluttering burrs, disconcertingly high-pitched. It is her editor, asking when she will be able to make a layout conference. She speaks, placating, explaining, just sketching in an appeal for sympathy. The editor of A Woman’s Place is a man, who reads and slightly despises the pieces about the guilt of the working mother which his periodical periodically puts out. Debbie changes tack, and makes him laugh with a description of where poor Jamie’s spots have managed to sprout. ‘Poor little bugger,’ quacks the editor into Debbie ‘s ear, inaudible to the rest of the house.

  Up and down the stairs, joining all three floors, surges a roaring and wheezing noise, a rhythmic and complex and swelling crescendo, snorting, sucking, with a high-pitched drone planing over a kind of grinding sound, interrupted every now and then by a frenetic rattle, accompanied by a new, menacing whine. Behind the Hoover, upwards and downwards, comes Mrs Brown, without whom, it must immediately be said, Debbie’s world would not hold together.

  Mrs Brown came ten years ago, in answer to an advertisement in the local paper. Natasha was four, and Jamie was on the way. Debbie was unwell and at her wits’ end, with fear of losing her job. She put ‘artistic family’ in the advertisement, expecting perhaps to evoke some tolerance, if not positive affection, for the tattered wallpaper and burgeoning mess. She didn’t have much response—a couple of art students, one an unmarried mum who wanted to share babysitting, painting-time, and chores, a very old, purblind, tortoise-paced ex-parlourmaid, and Mrs Brown. Mrs Brown had a skin which was neither black nor brown but a kind of amber yellow, the sort of yellow bruises go, before they vanish, but all over. She had a lot of wiry soot-coloured hair, which rose, like the crown of a playing-card king, out of a bandeau of flowery material, tied tightly about her brow, like the towelling of a tennis star, or the lace cap of an oldfashioned maid. Mrs Brown’s clothes were, and are, flowery and surprising, jumble sale remnants, rejects and ends of lines, rainbow-coloured jumpers made from the ping-pong-ball-sized unwanted residues of other people’s knitting. She came for her interview in a not too clean (but not too dirty) film-star’s trench-coat, which she didn’t take off until Debbie had said, dry-mouthed with anxiety, ‘I think you and I might manage to get on, don’t you?’ And Mrs Brown had nodded decisively, accepted a cup of coffee, and divested herself of the trench-coat, revealing pantaloons made of some kind of thick cream-coloured upholstery linen, wonderfully traversed by crimson open-mouthed Indian flowers and birds of paradise and tendrils of unearthly creepers, and a royal-blue jumper embroidered all over with woollen daisies, white marguerites, orange black-eyed Susans.

  Mrs Brown does not smile very much. Her face has some resemblance to a primitive mask, cheeks in triangular planes, long, straight, salient nose, a mouth usually tightly closed. Her expression can be read as prim, or grim, or watchful or perhaps—though this is not the first idea that comes to mind—perhaps resigned. She likes to go barefoot in the house, it turns out—she is not used to this level of heating, she explains, implying—or does Debbie misread her?—that the heating is an unhealthy extravagance. She comes up behind you with no warning, and at first this used to irritate Debbie most frightfully, but now she is used to it, she is used to Mrs Brown, her most powerful emotion in relation to Mrs Brown is terror that she will leave. If Mrs Brown is not Debbie’s friend, she is the closest person to Debbie on earth, excluding perhaps the immediate family. Debbie and Mrs Brown do not share the usual intimacies, they have no common chatter about other people, but they have a kind of rock-bottom knowledge of each other’s fears and pains, or so Debbie thinks, knowing, nevertheless, that Mrs Brown knows more about her than she will ever know about Mrs Brown, since it is in Debbie’s house that the relationship is carried out. Mrs Brown washes Debbie’s underwear and tidies Debbie’s desk, putting Debbie’s letters, private and official, threatening and secret, in tidy heaps. Mrs Brown counts the bottles and sweeps up the broken glass after parties, though she does not partake of the festive food. Mrs Brown changes Debbie ‘s sheets.

  Debbie did not ask Mrs Brown at that decisive interview whether Mrs Brown had children, though she was dying to, because she, Debbie, so resents being asked, by those interviewing her for jobs, whether she has children, what she would do with them. She did ask if Mrs Brown had a telephone, and Mrs Brown said yes, she did, she found it essential, she used the word ‘essential’ tidily and drily, just like that, without elaboration. ‘So you will tell me in advance, if at all possible,’ says Debbie, trying to sound sweet and commonly courteous, ‘if you can’t come ever, if you aren’t going to be able to come ever, because I have to make such complicated arrangements if people are going to let me down, that is, can’t make it for any reason.’ ‘I think you’ll find I’m reliable,’ says Mrs Brown. ‘But it’s no good me saying so, you’ll have to see. You needn’t worry though, bar the unforeseen.’ ‘Acts of God,’ says Debbie. ‘Well, and acts of Hooker too,’ says Mrs Brown, without saying who Hooker might be.

  Debbie did find that Mrs Brown was, as she had said, reliable. She also discovered, not immediately, that Mrs Brown had two sons, Lawrence and Gareth, shortened to Gary by his friends but not by Mrs Brown. These boys were already ten and eight when Mrs Brown came to Debbie. Lawrence is now at Newcastle University—’the lodgings are cheaper up there’ says Mrs Brown. Gareth has left home without many qualifications and works, Mrs Brown says, ‘in distribution’. He has made the wrong sort of friends, Mrs Brown says, but does not elaborate. Hooker is the father of Lawrence and Gareth. Debbie does not know, and does not ask, whether Hooker is or is not Mr Brown. During the early childhood of Natasha and Jamie, Hooker would make sudden forays into Mrs Brown’s life and council flat, from which he had departed before she took to going out to clean up after people like Debbie. One of Mrs Brown’s rare days off was her court appearance to get an injunction to stop Hooker coming round. Hooker was the cause of Mrs Brown’s bruises, the chocolate and violet stains on the gold skin, the bloody cushions in the hair and the wine-coloured efflorescence on her lips. Once, and once only, at this time, Debbie found Mrs Brown sitting on the bathroom stool, howling, and brought her cups of coffee, and held her hands, and sent her home in a taxi. It was Mrs Brown who saw Debbie through the depression after the birth of Jamie, with a mixture of carefully timed indulgences and requirements. ‘I’ve brought you a bowl of soup, you’ll do no good in the world if you don’t eat.’ ‘I’ve brought Baby up to you, Mrs Dennison, he’s crying his heart out with hunger, he needs his mother, that’s what it is.’ They call each other Mrs Dennison and Mrs Brown. They rely on the kind of distance and breathing space this courtesy gives them. Mrs Brown was scathing about the days in hospital, when she was concussed, after one of Hooker’s visits. ‘They call you love, and dearie, and pet. I say, I need a bit of respect, my name is Mrs Brown.’

  Debbie types ‘new moulding techniques give new streamlined shapes to the most banal objects. Sink trays and storage jars …’ Banal is the wrong word, she thinks. Everyday? Wrong too. The Hoover snorts on the turning of the stair. The doorbell rings. A voice of pure male rage rings out from the top floor.

  ‘Debbie. Debbie, are you there? Just come here a moment.’


  Debbie is torn. Mrs Brown abandons the Hoover and all its slack, defunct-seeming tubes, along the banisters.

  ‘You attend to him, and I’ll just let the doctor in and say you’ll be down directly.’

  Debbie negotiates the Hoover and goes up the attic stairs.

  ‘Look,’ says Debbie’s husband, Robin. ‘Look what she has done. If you can’t get it into her head that she mustn’t muck about with my work-things she’ll have to go.’

  Robin has the whole third floor, once three bedrooms, a tiny room with a sink and a lavatory, as his studio. He has large pivoting windows set into the roof, with linen blinds, a natural cream, a terracotta. He can have almost whatever light he likes from whatever angle. Debbie feels her usual knot of emotions, fear that Robin will shout at Mrs Brown, fear that Mrs Brown will take offence, rage and grim gratitude mixed that it is always to her that he addresses his complaints.

  ‘The doctor has come for Jamie, darling,’ Debbie says. ‘I must go, he won’t have long.’

  ‘This bowl,’ says Robin Dennison, ‘this bowl, as anyone can see, is a work of art. Look at that glaze. Look at those huge satisfactory blue and orange fruits in it, look at the green leaves and the bits of yellow, just look, Debbie. Now I ask you, would anyone suppose this bowl was a kind of dustbin for things they were too lazy to put away or carry off, would they, do you suppose, anyone with their wits about them, would they?’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ says Debbie neutrally, her ear turned to the stairs.

  ‘Look, ‘cries Robin. The bowl, both sumptuously decorated and dusty, contains a few random elastic bands, a chain of paperclips, an obscure plastic cog from some tiny clock, a battered but unused stamp, two oil pastels, blue and orange, a piece of dried bread, a very short length of electric wire, a dead chrysanthemum, three coloured thumbtacks (red, blue, green), a single lapis cufflink, an electric bulb with a burnt patch on its curve, a box of matches, a china keyhole cover, two indiarubbers, a dead bluebottle and two live ants, running in circles, possibly busy, possibly frantically lost.

  ‘Her habits are filthy,’ says Robin.

  Debbie looks around the studio, which is not the habitation of a tidy man. Apart from the inevitable mess, splashed palettes, drying canvases, jars of water, there are other heaps and dumps. Magazines, opened and closed, wineglasses, beer glasses, bottles, constellations of crayons and pencils, unopened messages from the Income Tax, saucers of clips and pins.

  ‘It is hard for anyone to tell what to leave alone, up here, and what to clear up.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. Dirt is dirt, and personal things, things in use, are things in use. All it requires is intelligence.’

  ‘She seems to have found that cufflink you were going on about.’

  ‘I expect I found it myself, and put it down somewhere safe, and she interfered with it.’

  All this is part of a ritual dialogue which Debbie can hardly bear to hear again, let alone to utter her own banal parts of it, and yet she senses it is somehow necessary to their survival. She does not wholly know whether it is necessary because Robin needs to assert himself and win, or because if she does not stand between Robin and Mrs Brown Mrs Brown will leave. She does not need to think about it any more; she turns and hearkens to it, like Donne’s other compass half, like a heliotrope.

  ‘She could see I was painting exactly that dish.’

  Indeed, there are sketches in charcoal, in coloured chalks, of exactly that dish, on an expanse of grained wood, propped up around the studio.

  It crosses Debbie’s mind that Mrs Brown used exactly that dish as a picking-up receptacle for exactly that reason. Mrs Brown has her own modes of silent aggression. She does not raise this idea. Robin is neither moved by nor interested in Mrs Brown’s feelings.

  ‘Shall I take them all and throw them away in the bin in my study, darling? And dust your bowl for you?’

  ‘Wait a minute. Those are quite all right rubber bands. I was using that bread for rubbing out. The matches are OK, nothing wrong with them. Some of us can’t afford to throw good tools away, you know.’

  ‘Where shall I put them?’

  ‘Just stick them on the table over there. I’ll see to them myself. Dust the bowl, please.’

  Debbie does as he asks, abstracting the cufflink, which she will return to his dressing-table. She looks at her husband, who glares back at her, and then gives a smile, like a rueful boy. He is a long, thin, unsubstantial man in jeans and a fisherman’s smock, with big joints, knuckles and wrists and ankles, like an adolescent, which he is not. He has a very English face, long and fine and pink and white, like a worried colt. His soft hair is pushed up all round his head like a hedgehog and is more or less the same colour as one. His eyes are an intense blue, like speedwells. A photographer could choose between making him look like a gentle mystic and making him look like a dedicated cricketer. A painter could choose between a haziness at the edges, always light, never heavy, and very clear sketched-in features, bones, a brow, a chin, a clearcut nose, in a kind of pale space.

  ‘You have managed to make her understand about the fetishes.’

  ‘It took long enough,’ he grumbles. ‘I even gave her lectures on tones and complementary colours, I just stood there with the things and showed her.’

  ‘I should think that was interesting for her.’

  ‘She should know her job, without all that fuss. Anyway, it worked, I grant you that it worked.’

  ‘I must go, darling, the doctor’s here. Do you want coffee when he’s gone, shall I bring you a mug?’

  ‘Yes please. That will be nice.’

  He is not apologising, but the ritual confrontation is over. Debbie kisses him. His cheek is soft. She says,

  ‘Have you heard from that girl from the Callisto Gallery, yet?’

  ‘I don’t think she’ll come. I don’t think she ever meant to come.’

  ‘Yes, she did,’ said Debbie. ‘I talked to her, too. She really liked that blue and yellow plate picture Toby has got in his loo. She said she didn’t think much of Toby’s taste in general, but that was exquisite, she said, she said she just sat there staring at it and caused an awful queue!’

  ‘She was probably drunk.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Robin. She’ll turn up, I know. I don’t say things I don’t mean, do I?’

  Debbie doesn’t know whether the girl, Shona McRury, will turn up or not, but she says she will, with force, because it is better for her, as well as for Robin, if he is in a hopeful mood. Deborah loves Robin. She has loved him since they met at Art School, where she studied Graphic Design and he studied Fine Art. She wanted to be a wood-engraver and illustrate children’s books. What she loved about Robin was the quality of his total dedication to his work, which had a certain austere separateness from everyone else’s work. Those were the days of the sixties, in fact the early seventies, when much painting was abstract, washes of colour and no colour, geometric patterns, games with the nature of canvas and pigment and the colours of light and their effect on the eye. Robin was a neo-realist before neo-realism. He painted what he saw, metal surfaces, wooden surfaces, plaster surfaces, with hallucinatory skill and accuracy.

  He painted expanses of neutral colours—wooden planks, glass table-tops, beige linen, crumbling plaster, and somewhere, somewhere unexpected, not quite in a corner, not quite in the centre, not where the folds were pulling from or the planks ran, he painted something very small and very brilliant, a glass ball, a lustre vase, a bouquet of bone china flowers (never anything alive), a heap of feathers. It was just this side of kitsch, then and now. It could have been turned into sweet prints and sold in folders in gift shops, then, for its wit, now for its nostalgic emptiness containing verisimilitude. But Debbie saw that it was a serious attempt at a serious and terrible problem, an attempt to answer the question every artist must ask him or herself, at some time, why bother, why make representations of anything at all?

  She said to him, seeing her first two of the series, a hexagonal Ch
inese yellow box on a grey blanket, a paperweight on a kitchen table, ‘They are miraculous, they are like those times when time seems to stop, and you just look at something, and see it, out of time, and you feel surprised that you can see at all, you are so surprised, and the seeing goes on and on, and gets better and better…’

  ‘Is that what you see in them?’ he said.

  Oh yes. Isn’t that what you meant?’

  ‘It is exactly what I meant. But nobody’s ever seen it. Or nobody’s ever said it, anyway.’

  ‘I expect they do, really’

  ‘Sometimes I think, it just looks—ordinary—to other people. Unprivileged things, you know.’

  ‘How could it?’ said Debbie.

  Sex makes everything shine, even if it is not privileged, and Debbie made Robin happy and their happiness made his pictures seem stranger and brighter, perhaps even made them, absolutely, stranger and brighter. When they got married, Robin had a few hours part-time teaching in a college, and Debbie, whose degree gave her more marketable skills, got a job doing layout in a corset-trade magazine, and then a subordinate job in A Woman’s Place, and then promotion. She was good, she was well-paid, she was the breadwinner. It seemed silly for Robin to go on teaching at all, his contribution was so meagre. Debbie’s head was full of snazzy swimsuits and orange vats of carrot soup with emerald parsley sprinkled in it, with lipsticks from grape and plum to poppy and rose, with eyegloss and blusher and the ghosts of unmade woodcuts. Her fingers remembered the slow, careful work in the wood, with a quiet grief, that didn’t diminish, but was manageable. She hated Robin because he never once mentioned the unmade wood-engravings. It is possible to feel love and hate quite quietly, side by side, if one is a self-contained person. Debbie continued to love Robin, whilst hating him because of the woodcuts, because of the extent of his absence of interest in how she managed the house, the children, the money, her profession, his needs and wants, and because of his resolute attempts to unsettle, humiliate, or drive away Mrs Brown, without whom all Debbie ‘s balancing acts would clatter and fall in wounding disarray.