what must happen when she had finished—there was complete human silence in the salon. There were strange, harshly musical sounds all round. A bowl rocking on a glass shelf. A pair of scissors, dancing on a hook, their frenzy diminishing. Uneven spasmodic falls of glass, like musical hailstones on shelves and floors. A susurration of hairpins on paper. A slow creaking of damaged panes. Her own hands were bleeding. Lucian advanced crunching over the shining silt, and dabbed at them with a towel. He too was bloodied—specks on his shirt, a fine dash on his brow, nothing substantial. It was a strange empty battlefield, full of glittering fragments and sweet-smelling rivulets and puddles of venous-blue and fuchsia-red unguents, patches of crimson-streaked foam and odd intense spills of orange henna or cobalt and copper.‘I’d better go,’ she said, turning blindly with her bleeding hands, still in her uncouth maroon drapery.‘Deirdre’ll make you a cup of coffee,’ said Lucian. ‘You’d better sit down and take a breather.’He took a neck brush and swept a chair for her. She stared, irresolute.‘Go on. We all feel like that, sometimes. Most of us don’t dare. Sit down.’They all gathered round, the young, making soothing, chirruping noises, putting out hands with vague patting, calming gestures.‘I’ll send you a cheque.’‘The insurance’ll pay. Don’t worry. It’s insured. You’ve done me a good turn in a way. It wasn’t quite right, the colours. I might do something different. Or collect the insurance and give up. Me and my girlfriend are thinking of setting up a stall in the Antique Hypermarket. Costume jewellery. Thirties and forties kitsch. She has sources. I can collect the insurance and have a go. I’ve had enough of this. I’ll tell you something, I’ve often felt like smashing it all up myself, just to get out of it— like a great glass cage it is—and go out into the real world. So you mustn’t worry, dear.’
She sat at home and shook, her cheeks flushed, her eyes bright with tears. When she had pulled herself together, she would go and have a shower and soak out the fatal coils, reduce them to streaming rat-tails. Her husband came in, unexpected—she had long given up expecting or not expecting him, his movements were unpredictable and unexplained. He came in tentatively, a large, alert, ostentatiously work-wearied man. She looked up at him speechless. He saw her. (Usually he did not.)‘You look different. You’ve had your hair done. I like it. You look lovely. It takes twenty years off you. You should have it done more often.’And he came over and kissed her on the shorn nape of her neck, quite as he used to do.
Art Work
In 1947 Matisse painted Le Silence habite des maisons. It is reproduced in Sir Lawrence Gowing’s Matisse, only very small and in black and white. Two people sit at the corner of a table. The mother, it may be, has a reflective chin propped on a hand propped on the table. The child, it may be, turns the page of a huge white book, whose arch of paper makes an integral curve with his/her lower arm. In front, a vase of flowers. Behind, six huge panes of window, behind them, a mass of trees and perhaps sunlight. The people’s faces are perfect blank ovals, featureless. Up above them, in the top lefthand corner of the canvas, level with the top of the window, is a chalked outline, done as it might be by a child, of a round on a stalk, above bricks. It is a pity there are no colours but it is possible, tempting, to imagine them, sumptuous as they were in what Gowing says was ‘the reconciliation which is only within the reach of great painters in old age’. The pictures, Gowing says, have extraordinary virility. ‘At last Matisse is wholly at ease with the fierce impulse.’ It is a dark little image on the page, charcoal-grey, slate-grey, soft pale pencil-grey, subdued, demure. We may imagine it flaming, in carmine or vermilion, or swaying in indigo darkness, or perhaps—outdoors—gold and green. We may imagine it. The darkness of the child may be black on black or black on blue or blue on some sort of red. The book is white. Who is the watching totem under the ceiling?There is an inhabited silence in 49 Alma Road, in the sense that there are no voices, though there are various sounds, some of them even pervasive and raucous sounds, which an unconcerned ear might construe as the background din of a sort of silence. There is the churning hum of the washing-machine, a kind of splashy mechanical giggle, with a grinding note in it, tossing its wet mass one way, resting and simmering, tossing it the other. A real habitue of this noise will tense him or herself against the coming banshee-scream of the spin-cycle, accompanied by a drumming tattoo of machine feet scrabbling on the tiles.The dryer is chuntering too. It is not a new dryer, its carbon brushes are worn, it thumps and creaks and screeches in its slow circling. The mass of cloth inside it flails, flops with a crash, rises, flails, flops with a crash. An attentive ear could hear the difference in the texture and mass of the flop as the sleeves and stockings are bound into sausages and balls by the fine straps of petticoats and bras.In the front room, chanting to itself, for no one is watching it, the television is full on in mid-morning. Not loudly, there are rules about noise. The noise it is making is the wilfully upbeat cheery squitter of female presenters of children’s TV, accented with regular, repetitive amazement, mixed in with the grunts and cackles and high-pitched squeaks of a flock of furry puppets, a cross-eyed magenta haystack with a snout, a kingfisher blue gerbil with a whirling tail, a torpid emerald green coiled serpent, with a pillar-box red dangling tongue and movable fringed eyelids. At regular intervals, between the bouts of presenter-squitter and puppet snorts and squawks, comes, analogous to the spin-cycle, the musical outbursts, a drumroll, a squeal on a woodwind, a percussion battery, a ta-ta ta TA, for punctuation, for a roseate full-frame with a lime-coloured logo T-NE-TV.On the first floor, behind a closed door, the circular rush and swish of Jamie’s electric trains can be heard. Nothing can be heard of Natasha’s record-player, and Natasha cannot hear the outside world, for her whole head is stuffed with beating vibrations and exploding howls and ululations. She lies on her bed and twitches in rhythm. Anyone coming in could well hear, from the other side of the corridor, the twangling tinny bumps made by the baffled sound trying to break out of its boxer-glove packaging. Natasha’s face has the empty beatific intelligence of some of Matisse’s supine women. Her face is white and oval and luminous with youth. Her hair is inky blue-black, and fanned across her not-too-clean pillows. Her bedspread is jazzy black forms of ferns or seaweeds, on a scarlet ground, forms the textile designer would never have seen, without Matisse. Her arms and legs dangle beyond the confines of the ruffled rectangle of this spread, too gawky to be an odalisque, but just as delicious in their curves. White, limp, relaxed, twitching. Twitches can’t be painted.From Debbie’s room comes the sound of the typewriter. It is an old mechanical typewriter, its noises are metallic and clicking. It chitters on to the end of a line, then there is the clash of the return, and the musical, or almost musical ‘cling’ of the little bell. Tap tap tap tap tappety tappety tappety clash cling tappety tap tap. A silence. Debbie sits over her typewriter with her oval chin in her long hands, and her black hair coiled gracefully in her neck. It is easy to see where Natasha’s ink and ivory beauty comes from. Debbie frowns. She taps a tooth (ivory lacquer, a shade darker than the skin) with an oval nail, rose madder. Debbie’s office, or study, is very cramped. There is a drawing-board, but if it is not in use, it is blocked up against the window, obscuring much of the light, and all of the vision of pillar-box red geraniums and cobalt-blue lobelias in a window box on the sill. Debbie can work at her desk or work at her drawing-board, but not both at once, though she would like to be able to, she is the design editor of A Woman’s Place, of which the, perhaps obscure, premise is that a woman’s place is not only, perhaps not even primarily, in the Home. Debbie is working at home at the moment because Jamie has chicken pox and the doctor is coming, and the doctor cannot say at what time he will or won’t call, there is too much pressure. Jamie has the same inky hair as his mother and sister, and has even longer blacker lashes over black eyes. He has the same skin too, but at the moment it is a wonderfully humped and varied terrain of rosy peaks and hummocks, mostly the pink of those boring little begonias with fleshy leaves, but some raging into salmon-deeps and some extinct volcanoes, with umber and ochre crusts. It was Jamie who was watching the TV but he cannot stick at anything, he itches too wildly, he tears at his flesh with his bitten-down nails, he rubs himself against chairs. Debbie stood him on a coffee table and swabbed and painted him with calamine lotion, creating a kind of streaked sugar or plaster of Paris mannikin, with powdery pinky-beige crude surfaces, rough make-up, failed paint, a dull bland colour, under which the bumpy buds of the pox heated themselves into re-emergence. ‘War-paint,’ Debbie said to her son, squeezing and stippling the liquid on his round little belly, between his poor hot legs. ‘You could put stripes of cocoa on,’ said Jamie. ‘And icing sugar. That would make three colours of stripes.’ Debbie would have liked to paint him all over, with fern-green cake dye and cochineal, if that would have distracted or assuaged him, but she had to get the piece she was writing done, which was about the new wave of kitchen plastic design, wacky colours, staggering new streamlined shapes.On Debbie’s
