The Matisse Stories

entirely because of his precarious vocation. His father, a Borough Surveyor, behaved in much the same way, particularly with regard to his distinction between his own untouchable ‘things’ and other people’s, especially the cleaning-lady’s ‘filth’. Mr Dennison, Mr Rodney Dennison, used to shout at and about the ‘charwoman’ if pipe-dottle was thrown away, or soap-fragments amalgamated, or scattered bills tidily gathered. He, like Robin with Mrs Brown, used to feel a kind of panic of constriction, like the pain of sinus-fluid thickening in the skull-pockets, when threatened by tidy touches. He, like Robin, used to see Mrs Briggs’s progress like a snail-trail across his private spaces. Robin puts it all down to Art. He does not ask himself if his hatred of Mrs Brown is a deflected resentment of his helplessness in the capable hands of his wife, breadwinner and life-manager. He knows it is not so: Debbie is beautiful and clean and represents order. Mrs Brown is chaotic and wild to look at and a secret smoker and represents—even while dispersing or re-distributing it—‘filth’.Mrs Brown has always had an awkward habit of presuming to give the family gifts. She possesses a knitting-machine, which Hooker got off the back of a lorry, and she is also good with knitting needles, crochet-hooks, embroidery silks and tapestry (not often, these two last, they are too expensive). She makes all her own clothes, out of whatever comes to hand, old plush curtains, Arab blankets, parachute silk, his own discarded trousers. She makes them flamboyantly, with patches and fringes and braid and bizarre buttons. The epitome of tat, Robin considers, and he has to consider, for she always strikes the eye, in a magenta and vermilion overall over salmon-pink crepe pantaloons, in a lime-green shift with black lacy inserts. This would not be so bad, if she didn’t make, hadn’t made for years, awful jumpers for Natasha and Jamie, awful rainbow jumpers in screaming hues, candy-striped jumpers, jumpers with bobble-cherries bouncing on them, long peculiar rainbow scarves in fluffy angora, all sickly ice-cream colours. Robin tells Debbie these things must be sent back at once, his children can’t be seen dead in them. The children are ambivalent, depending on age and circumstances. Jamie wore out one jumper with red engines and blue cows when he was six and would not be parted from it. Natasha in her early teens had an unexpected success at a disco in a kind of dayglo fringed bolero (acid yellow, salmon pink, swimming-pool blue) but has rejected other offerings with her father’s fastidious distaste. The real sufferer is Debbie, whose imagination is torn all ways. She knows from her own childhood exactly how it feels to wear clothes one doesn’t like, isn’t comfortable and invisible in, is embarrassed by. She also believes very strongly that there is more true kindness and courtesy in accepting gifts gratefully and enthusiastically than in making them. And, more selfishly, she simply cannot do without Mrs Brown, she needs Mrs Brown, her breakfast table is ornamented with patchwork teacosies contributed by Mrs Brown, her study chairs have circular cushions knitted in sugar-pink and orange by Mrs Brown. Mrs Brown stands in Debbie’s study door sometimes and expounds her colour theory.‘They always told us, didn’t they, the teachers and grans, orange and pink, they make you blink, blue and green should not be seen, mauve and red cannot be wed, but I say, they’re all there, the colours, God made ‘em all, and mixes ‘em all in His creatures, what exists goes together somehow or other, don’t you think, Mrs Dennison?’‘Well, yes, but there are rules too, you know, Mrs Brown, how to get certain effects, there are rules, complementary colours and things‘I’m learning all that. He tells me, when I move his things by accident, or whatever. Fascinating.’Mrs Brown’s yellow face is long, unsmiling and judicious. She adds, ‘If Jamie’s got no use for that nice sky-blue tank-top I did for him I’ll have it back if you don’t mind, I’ve got a use for a bit of sky-blue.’‘Oh, he loves it, Mrs Brown, it’s just a wee bit tight under the armpits, you understand …’‘As I said, I’ve got a use for a bit of sky-blue.’Implacably. Debbie feels terrible. Mrs Brown goes through Jamie’s drawers and points out that there are holes in his red sweat-shirt, that those rugger socks are shockingly shrunk, look at those tiddly feet. She puts them in a plastic dustbin bag. Debbie adds a cocktail dress she made a mistake about, mulberry shot silk, and two of Robin’s ties, presents from his auntie Nem, which he will never wear, because they are a horrible mustard colour with plummy flowers.‘Interesting,’ says Mrs Brown, holding them up like captured eels, and adding them to her spoils. She is mollified, Debbie thinks, the mulberry dress has mollified her. She balks at knowing what Mrs Brown will do with the mulberry dress.Robin Dennison’s ‘fetishes’ have a table of their own, a white-painted wooden table, very simple. Once they were mantelpiece ‘things’ but as they took on their status of ‘fetishes’ they were given this solidly unassuming English altar. What they have in common is a certain kind of glossy, very brightly coloured solidity. They are the small icons of a cult of colour. They began with the soldier, who cost 5/6 when Robin was little, and is made of painted wood, with red trousers and a blue jacket and a tall, bulbous, black wooden bearskin. His red is fading cherry-crimson, his blue is a fading colour between royal and ultramarine. He has a gold strap under his wooden chin and a pair of hectic pink circular spots on his wooden cheeks. Robin does not often paint him now—he cannot clear him of his double connotations of militarism and infantilism, and he loves him for neither of these, but because he was his first model for slivers of shine on rounded surfaces. Sometimes Robin paints his shadow into little crowds of the other things.Some of the other things are pure representations of single colours. Of these, two are gloss—a cobalt-blue candlestick from the glassworks at Biot, and a round heavy grass-green, golden-green apple made by Wedgwood, greener and greener in its depths. The yellow thing was much the most expensive. It is not pure yellow as the candlestick is blue, and the apple is green, it is sunny-yellow, butter-yellow, buttercup-yellow with a blue rim, a reproduction sauceboat from Monet’s self-designed breakfast service for his house at Giverny. It cost ?50 which Robin did not have, but spent, he wanted that yellow so much. He did not really want the sauce-boat, but anything else he wanted cost money which even in his madness he saw he didn’t have. Robin in his fit of educating Mrs Brown observes to her that the blue rim makes the yellow colour sing out because the colours are almost complementary. He would, however, still like to find a yellow thing without the blue. There is no orange thing either. Robin often stands an orange and a lemon amongst the things, to make the colours complete, and Mrs Brown’s habit of moving these, or even throwing them away when they begin to soften and darken and grow patches of sage-green, blue-specked mould, is one of the things that makes Robin see red and roar.Purple is represented by a rather sweet hand-made china sculpture of a round bowl of violets. These are both pale mauve and deep purple; they have a few, not many, green leaves in a wishy-washy apple colour, and their container is a softly-glazed black. Sometimes Robin leaves the leaves out, when he doesn’t want that colour. He knows the fetishes so well, he can allow for the effect of the leaves on the violets. Sometimes he wishes the leaves weren’t there and sometimes he makes them fit into his colour-scheme with delicate shifts of tones and accommodations in other places. There was a problem with red for years and years. There was a banal red German plate, modern and utilitarian, a good strong red, that stood in, but could not make itself sing out or be loved. When Robin found the present red thing he felt very uneasy because he knew immediately it was the, or a, right thing, and at the same time he didn’t like it. He still doesn’t. Like the poor soldier, but in more sinister ways, it has too much meaning. He found it in a Chinese bric-a-brac shop, in a dump-bin with hundreds of others. It is a large red, heart-shaped pincushion, plumply and gleamingly covered in a poppy-red silk which is exactly what he wants, at once soft and shining, delicate and glossy. It had a vulgar white lace frill, like a choir-boy’s collar, which Robin took off. Sometimes he puts into it some of his grandmother’s old hatpins, imitation jewels, or lumps of jet. But he doesn’t quite like this, it borders on the surrealist, and though he senses that might be interesting, it also worries him. He did buy a box of multi-coloured glass-headed pins which he occasionally displays in a random scattering shape, or, once, a tight half-moon.Besides the single-coloured things, there are a few, a very few, multi-coloured things. A 1950s Venetian glass tree, picked up in a second-hand shop, bearing little round fruits of many colours—emerald green, ruby and dark sapphire, amethyst and topaz. A pottery jug from Deruta with a huge triangular beak-like spout, covered with bright round-petalled childish flowers in all the colours, and a pair of chirpy primitive singing-birds, in brown. A pot, also from Deruta, with a tawny-gold and blue-crested grotesque merman, or human-headed dragon, bearded and breathing a comma-shaped cloud of russet fire. There is a kite on the wall, a Korean kite in puce and yellow and blue and green and scarlet, and there are two large Chinese silk pipe-cleaner birds, crested and flaunting long tails, one predominantly crimson, with a yellow and aquamarine crest, one blue and green. The birds, too, the most fragile things, are a point of contention between Robin and Mrs Brown. She says they collect dust. He says she bends their legs and squashes their down and interferes with the way they turn their necks to preen. She says, they don’t balance, the way he fixes them. Once she balanced one on the bough of the glass tree. There was a sulk that lasted weeks, and Mrs Brown talked of leaving.It was after Debbie patched up this difference that Robin explained to Mrs Brown about red and green. He moved the apple back next to the pincushion, and redeployed the violets in front of the Monet sauceboat, beside the cobalt-blue candlestick, which was shaped a little like a gentian, a tall cup on a stem. Mrs Brown’s preference was for standing the fetishes in a rainbow line, from infra-red to ultra-violet, so to speak. Robin said,‘Certain combinations have certain effects. For instance the opposition of yellow and violet, blue and orange, that can appear natural in a way, because natural shadows