are blue or violet. Light and shade, you see? Whereas red and green, if you put them next to each other— sometimes you can see a kind of dancing yellow line where they meet—and this isn’t to do with light and shade, it’s to do, possibly, with the fact that if you add certain reds to certain greens you can make yellow, which you would never have guessed.’‘Geraniums are natural,’ said Mrs Brown.Robin stared at her abstractedly.‘Natural red and green. They don’t make yellow.’‘Look,’ said Robin, pushing together the soft heart and the hard apple. He could see the dance of unreal yellow. He was entranced.‘Hmn,’ said Mrs Brown.‘Can you see yellow?’‘Well, a sort of, how shall I say, a sort of wriggling, a sort of shimmering. I see what you mean.’‘I try to make that happen, in the paintings.’‘So I see. It’s interesting, once I know what you’re up to.’The sentence was a concession, unsmiling, not wholly gracious. She accepted that he had given her what he could, the battle was, she obviously considered, won, and by her. Robin was relieved, really. He was not so far out of touch with real life that he could not sense Debbie’s fear of losing Mrs Brown. So he had given Mrs Brown his secret vision of the yellow line. Mrs Brown went out, head high. She was wearing a kind of orange and green camouflage Afro-wrapper, and a pink headband.
Shona McRury telephones. She asks to speak to Debbie, who has in fact answered the phone, and spends a long time congratulating Debbie on an article on feminist art in A Woman’s Place, an article about the amorphous things that women make that do not claim the ‘authority’ of ‘art-works’, the undignified things women ‘frame’ that male artists have never noticed, tampons and nappies but not only those, and the painted interior cavities of women, not the soft fleshy desirable superficies explored/exploited by men. Debbie has made a lovely centre-spread of the crayon drawings of an artist called Brenda Murphy, who works in the kitchen with her children, using their materials, crayons and felt-tips on paper, creating works that are a savage and loving commentary on their lives together. Shona asks Debbie if she knows if Ms Murphy has an agent or a gallery, and Debbie answers abstractedly, praises the interesting variety, the eclectic brilliance of Callisto’s shows, and is rewarded by Shona McRury’s request to see Debbie’s husband’s work, which is so witty, she thinks, she just loves that mysteriously funny little painting in Toby’s loo, a jewel in a desert. Debbie thinks a jewel in a desert is a good phrase, but is not sure the idea of wit bodes well. Robin is, she recognises, somewhat humourless in his driven state. But she fixes something exact, for this coming Wednesday, without consulting Robin. Robin is perturbed and threatened by the closeness of Wednesday, as Debbie has foreseen. She becomes ever so slightly minatory, and at the same time plaintive. ‘It isn’t so easy to get a chance of getting the work seen by a gallery, you can’t just pick and choose your moments or you end up with none, as you ought to know by now, and I’ve done my best for you, I pinned her down, you have to, she’s so busy, even with the best will in the world …’Robin condescends, in terror, to have his work viewed.
Shona McRury has topaz eyes and long, silky brown hair, like a huge ribbon, caught up at the back with a tortoiseshell comb. She wears topaz ear-rings, little spheres on gold chains, that exactly match her eyes, and an olive silk suit, with a loose jacket and a pleated skirt, over a lemon-yellow silk shirt, all of which tone in impeccably with her eyes. (Debbie who is now a professional in these matters sees immediately how the whole delicate and powerful effect is constructed around the eyes, reinforced by a subtle powdering of olive and gold shadow shot with a sharper green, almost malachite.) She climbs up to Robin’s attic on dark-green lizard-skin shoes. Between the lizard skin and the olive silk are slightly golden metallic stockings on legs not quite beautiful, too thin, too straight. Robin goes first, then Shona McRury, then Debbie, then Mrs Brown, with a bottle of chilled Sauvignon and three glasses on a Japanese lacquer tray. Mrs Brown is wearing her bird-of-paradise upholstery trousers and a patchwork shirt in rainbow colours, stitched together with red feather-stitching. Although she has not brought herself a glass, she positions herself inside the studio door for the showing, and makes no attempt to go away, staring with sombre interest at Shona McRury’s elegance and Robin’s canvases.Debbie has not decided whether to leave Robin alone with Shona McRury, or to stay and put in a word here and there. Mrs Brown’s odd behaviour decides her, and is perhaps altogether too decisive. It is not in Debbie ‘s power to say anything like, ‘You may go now, Mrs Brown,’ but she can say to her, ‘Come on, let’s leave them to it,’ so she does, and she and Mrs Brown go downstairs together.Shona McRury prowls in Robin’s studio in her topaz ear-rings and lizard shoes. She rearranges the fetishes absentmindedly, rattling the Monet dish in its saucer. Robin puts up a series of paintings of the fetishes on different backgrounds, in different numbers, in different lights. White silk like a glacier, crumpled newspaper, dark boards, pale boards. Her mouth is large and soft and brown. She lights a cigarette. She says, ‘I like that,’ and ‘I like that,’ and nothing else for a bit, and then begins to read the paintings as allegories. ‘They’re modern vanitases, I see,’ says Shona McRury, ‘they’re about the littleness of our life.’ Robin tries to keep quiet. He cannot overbear her as if she were Mrs Brown, he cannot tell her that they are not about littleness but about the infinite terror of the brilliance of colour, of which he could almost die, he doesn’t think those things in words anyway. He does at first say things like, ‘Hmn, well, this one is solving a different kind of problem, d’you see?’ and then he doesn’t say anything because he can see she doesn’t see, she isn’t the slightest bit interested in the fact that the pictures, of which there are a very large number, never repeat, though they are all in a sense the same, they never set themselves exactly the same problem. She doesn’t see that. She says, ‘It’s a bit frightening, a bit depressing, all that empty space, isn’t it, it reminds you of coffins and bare kitchen tables with no food, no sustenance, all those bare boards, don’t they?’‘I don’t think of it that way,’ says Robin.‘How do you think of it?’‘Well, as a series of problems, really, inexhaustible problems, of light and colour, you know.’He does not say, because he does not articulate, the sense he has that he is allowed his patch of brilliance because he has dutifully and accurately and even beautifully painted all these null and neutral tones, the doves, the dusts, the dead leaves.‘Do you have any inkling of a change of direction, a next phase coming up, you know, a new focus of interest, anything like that?’‘I think if I had a big show—if it were all on show together, all the different— hm—aspects—hm—solutions, so to speak, temporary solutions—I might want to—move on to something else. It’s hard to imagine, really.’‘Is it?’He does not see how crucial this little question is. Oh yes. One thing at a time. I seem to have my work cut out, cut out, you know, for me, as it were, yes.’Shona McRury says, ‘All those prints of lonely deckchairs in little winds, in gardens and on beaches. When you see the first, you think, how moving, how interesting. And when you see the tenth, or the twentieth, you think, oh, another solitary deckchair with a bit of wind in it, what else is there? You know?’‘I think so.’‘I can see your work isn’t like that.’‘Oh no. Not at all like that.’‘But it might look like that. To the uneducated eye.’‘Might it?’‘It might.’
Debbie watches Shona McRury walk away down Alma Road. How beautifully her olive skirt sits on her thin haunches, how perfectly, how expensively, those pleats are coerced to caress. Robin says his talk with her went well, but Debbie thinks nothing of Robin’s judgement, and he does not seem seized with hope or vigour. Shona McRury’s long straight band of hair flaps and sidles. Mrs Brown, in her trench-coat, catches up with Shona McRury. Mrs Brown’s hair stands up like a wiry plant in a pot, inside a coil of plaited scarves, orange and lime. Mrs Brown says something to Shona McRury who varies her pace, turns her head, strokes her head, answers. Mrs Brown says something else. What can Mrs Brown have to say to Shona McRury? Debbie’s mind fantastically meditates treason, subversion, sabotage. But Mrs Brown has always been so good, so patient, despite her disdainful look, to which she has a right. Mrs Brown could not want to hurt Robin? Mrs Brown is in no position to hurt Robin, surely, if she did. Why should Shona McRury listen, more than out of politeness, to anything Mrs Brown has to say? They turn the corner. Debbie feels tears bursting, somewhere inside the flesh of her cheeks, in the ducts round her nose and eyes. She hears Robin’s voice on the stairs, saying it is just like that woman to go home without removing the wineglasses or wiping up the rings on his desk and drawing table.
Shona McRury sends a gallery postcard to Robin and Debbie jointly, saying that she really loved seeing the pictures, which have real integrity, and that things are very crowded and confused in the life of her gallery just now. Debbie knows that this means no, and suspects that the kindnesses are for her, Debbie ‘s, possible future usefulness, that is, A Woman’s Places possible future usefulness, to the Callisto Gallery. She does not say that to Robin, whom she is beginning to treat like a backward and stupid child, which worries her, since that is not what he is. And when A Woman’s Place sends her off a month or two later to the Callisto Gallery with a photographer, a nice-enough on-the-make Liverpudlian called Tom Sprot, to illustrate an article on a new feminist installation, she goes in a friendly enough mood. She is a reasonable woman, she could not have expected more from Shona McRury, and knows it.Tom Sprot has brilliantined blond hair and baggy tartan trousers. He is very laid-back, very calm. When he gets inside the gallery, which is normally creamy and airy, he says, ‘Wow!’ and starts rushing about, peering through his lens, with alacrity. The
