The Matisse Stories

is richly drawn and touches upon things that matter to people.” — People “Byatt exuberantly plays with the language of color, using it to establish a mood and, like a painter, to draw the reader into a carefully arranged scene.” — L.A. Reader

BOOKS BY A. S. BYATT

FICTIONThe Shadow of the Sun

The Game The Virgin in the Garden

Still Life

Sugar and Other Stories

Possession: A Romance

Angels and Insects

The Matisse Stories

Babel Tower

The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye

Elementals

The Biographer’s TaleCRITICISMDegrees of Freedom:

The Novels of Iris MurdochUnruly Times:

Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their TimePassions of the Mind:

Selected WritingsImagining Characters (with Ignes Sodre)

A. S. BYATT’S

The Matisse Stories

A. S. Byatt is the author of the novels Possession (winner of the Booker Prize in 1990), The Game, and the sequence The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, and Babel Tower. She has also written two novellas, published together as Angels and Insects, and four collections of shorter works, including The Matisse Stories and The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye. Educated at Cambridge, she was a senior lecturer in English at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. A distinguished critic as well as a novelist, she lives in London.

For Peter

Who taught me to look at things slowly.

With love.

Contents

Medusa’s AnklesArt WorkThe Chinese Lobster

Lachevelure, 1931-32

Medusa ’s Ankles

She had walked in one day because she had seen the Rosy Nude through the plate glass. That was odd, she thought, to have that lavish and complex creature stretched voluptuously above the coat rack, where one might have expected the stare, silver and supercilious or jetty and frenzied, of the model girl. They were all girls now, not women. The rosy nude was pure flat colour, but suggested mass. She had huge haunches and a monumental knee, lazily propped high. She had round breasts, contemplations of the circle, reflections on flesh and its fall.She had asked cautiously for a cut and blow-dry. He had done her himself, the owner, Lucian of ‘Lucian’s’, slender and soft-moving, resembling a balletic Hamlet with full white sleeves and tight black trousers. The first few times she came it was the trousers she remembered, better than his face, which she saw only in the mirror behind her own, and which she felt a middle-aged disinclination to study. A woman’s relation with her hairdresser is anatomically odd. Her face meets his belt, his haunches skim her breathing, his face is far away, high and behind. His face had a closed and monkish look, rather fine, she thought, under soft, straight, dark hair, bright with health, not with added fats, or so it seemed.‘I like your Matisse,’ she said, the first time.He looked blank.‘The pink nude. I love her.’Oh, that. I saw it in a shop. I thought it went exactly with the colour-scheme I was planning.’Their eyes met in the mirror.‘I thought she was wonderful,’ he said. ‘So calm, so damn sure of herself, such a lovely colour, I do think, don’t you? I fell for her, absolutely. I saw her in this shop in the Charing Cross Road and I went home, and said to my wife, I might think of placing her in the salon, and she thought nothing to it, but the next day I went back and just got her. She gives the salon a bit of class. I like things