filched.’
Mrs Brown comes in the next day accompanied by a grey-haired sylph in ballet tights and trainers.‘Mrs Brown, Mrs Brown,’ says Jamie (it is the school holidays), ‘Mrs Brown, we saw you on the telly. And your name is beautiful, and I think the Muppet sort of things and the little faces are stupiferous.’Mrs Brown says,‘It looks as though I can’t come for a bit, Mrs Dennison. I hadn’t quite taken what a change in my life it was going to make, showing anyone my things. I just suddenly got it into my head that it was time they were seen by someone, you know how it is, and things got taken on from there, out of my control rather, though I’m not complaining. I kept meaning to say something, but it didn’t seem to be the moment, and I was concerned for you, how you would take it, for you do need someone to rely on, as we both know. Now this here is Mrs Stimpson, who will do exactly what I did, I’ll show her all the ropes, and how not to interfere with Mr Dennison, and I really do think you’ll hardly notice, Mrs Dennison. It’ll be just the same.’Debbie stares silently at Mrs Brown. Mrs Brown drops her eyes and then looks up slightly flushed.‘You do see how it was?’ she asks, steadily enough. Debbie thinks, the worst thing is, if we had been friends, she would have shown me her things. But we weren’t. I only thought we were.Sheba Brown says, ‘We understood each other, Mrs Dennison. But no one’s unique. Mrs Stimpson is quite reliable and resourceful. I wouldn’t let you down by bringing anyone who wasn’t. She’ll be just like me.’Debbie says, ‘And does Mrs Stimpson make secret works of art?’‘Now that,’ says Sheba Brown, ‘you will have to find out for yourself.’Mrs Stimpson’s young-old face has a firm, knowing little smile on it. She says,‘We can but try, Mrs Dennison. Without prejudice.’‘I suppose so,’ says Debbie. Before she can open her mouth again Mrs Brown and Mrs Stimpson have gone into the kitchen. Debbie hears the coffee-grinder. They will bring her a cup of coffee. It will all be more or less the same.Or not quite the same. For one thing, Debbie goes back to making wood-engravings. A Book of Bad Fairies and A Book of Good Fairies, which have a certain success in the world of book illustration. Some of the more exotic fairies have the carved, haughty face of Sheba Brown, and the sweet, timeless face of Mrs Stimpson. And Robin? He roars at Mrs Stimpson, who humours him by appearing to be very flurried and rushing energetically to and fro at his behest. He also develops an interest in oriental mythology, and buys several books of tantric mandalas and prayer-wheels. One day Debbie goes up to his room and finds a new kind of painting on the easel, geometric, brightly coloured, highly organised, a kind of woven pattern of flames and limbs with a recurring motif of a dark, glaring face with red eyes and a protruding red tongue. ‘Kali the Destroyer,’ says Mrs Stimpson, knowledgeably at Debbie’s elbow. ‘It’s a picture of Kali the Destroyer.’ It is not right, thinks Debbie, that the black goddess should be a simplified travesty of Sheba Brown, that prolific weaver of bright webs. But at the same time she recognises a new kind of loosed, slightly savage energy in Robin’s use of colour and movement. ‘It’s got something,’ says Mrs Stimpson pleasantly. ‘I do really think it’s got something.’ Debbie has to agree. It has indeed got something.
The Chinese Lobster
The proprietors of the ‘Orient Lotus’ alternate frenetic embellishment with periods of lassitude and letting go. Dr Himmelblau knows this, because she has been coming here for quick lunches, usually solitary, for the last seven years or so. She chose it because it was convenient—it is near all her regular stopping-places, the National Gallery, the Royal Academy, the British Museum—and because it seemed unpretentious and quietly comfortable. She likes its padded seats, even though the mock leather is split in places. She can stack her heavy book-bags beside her and rest her bones.The window on to the street has been framed in struggling cheese-plants as long as she can remember. They grow denser, dustier, and still livelier as the years go by. They press their cut-out leaves against the glass, the old ones holly-dark, the new ones yellow and shining. The glass distorts and folds them, but they press on. Sometimes there is a tank of coloured fish in the window, and sometimes not. At the moment, there is not. You can see bottles of soy sauce, and glass containers which dispense toothpicks, one by one, and chrome-plated boxes full of paper napkins, also frugally dispensed one by one.Inside the door, for the last year or so, there has been a low square shrine, made of bright jade-green pottery, inside which sits a little brass god, or sage, in the lotus position, his comfortable belly on his comfortable knees. Little lamps, and sticks of incense, burn before him in bright scarlet glass pots, and from time to time he is decorated with scarlet and gold shiny paper trappings. Dr Himmelblau likes the colour-mixture, the bright blue-green and the saturated scarlet, so nearly the same weight. But she is a little afraid of the god, because she does not know who he is, and because he is obviously really worshipped, not just a decoration.Today there is a new object, further inside the door, but still before the tables or the coathangers. It is a display-case, in black lacquered wood, standing about as high as Dr Himmelblau’s waist—she is a woman of medium height—shining with newness and sparkling with polish. It is on four legs, and its lid and side-walls—about nine inches deep—are made of glass. It resembles cases in museums, in which you might see miniatures, or jewels, or small ceramic objects.Dr Himmelblau looks idly in. The display is brightly lit, and arranged on a carpet of that fierce emerald-green artificial grass used by greengrocers and undertakers.Round the edges on opened shells, is a border of raw scallops, the pearly flesh dulling, the repeating half-moons of the orange-pink roes playing against the fierce green.In the middle, in the very middle, is a live lobster, flanked by two live crabs. All three, in parts of their bodies, are in feeble perpetual motion. The lobster, slowly in this unbreathable element, moves her long feelers and can be seen to move her little claws on the end of her legs, which cannot go forward or back. She is black, and holds out her heavy great pincers in front of her, shifting them slightly, too heavy to lift up. The great muscles of her tail crimp and control and collapse. One of the crabs, the smaller, is able to rock itself from side to side, which it does. The crabs’ mouths can be seen moving from side to side, like scissors; all three survey the world with mobile eyes still lively on little stalks. From their mouths comes a silent hissing and bubbling, a breath, a cry. The colours of the crabs are matt, brick, cream, a grape-dark sheen on the claw-ends, a dingy, earthy encrustation on the hairy legs. The lobster was, is, and will not be, blue-black and glossy. For a moment, in her bones, Dr Himmelblau feels their painful life in the thin air. They stare, but do not, she supposes, see her. She turns on her heel and walks quickly into the body of the Orient Lotus’. It occurs to her that the scallops, too, are still in some sense, probably, alive.The middle-aged Chinese man—she knows them all well, but knows none of their names—meets her with a smile, and takes her coat. Dr Himmelblau tells him she wants a table for two. He shows her to her usual table, and brings another bowl, china spoon, and chopsticks. The muzak starts up. Dr Himmelblau listens with comfort and pleasure. The first time she heard the muzak, she was dismayed, she put her hand to her breast in alarm at the burst of sound, she told herself that this was not after all the peaceful retreat she had supposed. Her noodles tasted less succulent against the tin noise, and then, the second or the third time, she began to notice the tunes, which were happy, banal, Western tunes, but jazzed up and sung in what she took to be Cantonese. Oh what a beautiful morning. Oh what a beautiful day. I’ve got a kind of a feeling. Everything’s go-ing my way.’ Only in the incomprehensible nasal syllables, against a zithery plink and plunk, a kind of gong, a sort of bell. It was not a song she had ever liked. But she has come to find it the epitome of restfulness and cheerfulness. Twang, tinkle, plink, plink. A cross-cultural object, an occidental Orient, an oriental Western. She associates it now with the promise of delicate savours, of warmth, of satisfaction. The middle-aged Chinese man brings her a pot of green tea, in the pot she likes, with the little transparent rice-grain flowers in the blue and white porcelain, delicate and elegant.She is early. She is nervous about the forthcoming conversation. She has never met her guest personally, though she has of course seen him, in the flesh and on the television screen; she has heard him lecture, on Bellini, on Titian, on Mantegna, on Picasso, on Matisse.His style is orotund and idiosyncratic. Dr Himmelblau’s younger colleagues find him rambling and embarrassing. Dr Himmelblau, personally, is not of this opinion. In her view, Perry Diss is always talking about something, not about nothing, and in her view, which she knows to be the possibly crabbed view of a solitary intellectual, nearing retirement, this is increasingly rare. Many of her colleagues, Gerda Himmelblau believes, do not like paintings. Perry Diss does. He loves them, like sound apples to bite into, like fair flesh, like sunlight. She is thinking in his style. It is a professional hazard, of her own generation. She
