The Matisse Stories Read Online Free PDF

voice of pure male rage rings out from the top floor.
    ‘Debbie. Debbie, are you there? Just come here a moment.’
    Debbie is torn. Mrs Brown abandons the Hoover and all its slack, defunct-seeming tubes, along the banisters.
    ‘You attend to
him
, and I’ll just let the doctor in and say you’ll be down directly.’
    Debbie negotiates the Hoover and goes up the attic stairs.
    ‘Look,’ says Debbie’s husband, Robin. ‘Look what she has done. If you can’t get it into her head that she mustn’t muck about with my work-things she’ll have to go.’
    Robin has the whole third floor, once three bedrooms,a tiny room with a sink and a lavatory, as his studio. He has large pivoting windows set into the roof, with linen blinds, a natural cream, a terracotta. He can have almost whatever light he likes from whatever angle. Debbie feels her usual knot of emotions, fear that Robin will shout at Mrs Brown, fear that Mrs Brown will take offence, rage and grim gratitude mixed that it is always to her that he addresses his complaints.
    ‘The doctor has come for Jamie, darling,’ Debbie says. ‘I must go, he won’t have long.’
    ‘This bowl,’ says Robin Dennison, ‘this bowl, as anyone can see, is a work of art. Look at that glaze. Look at those huge satisfactory blue and orange fruits in it, look at the green leaves and the bits of yellow, just
look
, Debbie. Now I ask you, would anyone suppose this bowl was a kind of
dustbin
for things they were too lazy to put away or carry off, would they, do you suppose, anyone
with their wits about them
, would they?’
    ‘What’s the matter?’ says Debbie neutrally, her ear turned to the stairs.
    ‘Look
, ‘cries Robin. The bowl, both sumptuously decorated and dusty, contains a few random elastic bands, a chain of paperclips, an obscure plastic cog from sometiny clock, a battered but unused stamp, two oil pastels, blue and orange, a piece of dried bread, a very short length of electric wire, a dead chrysanthemum, three coloured thumbtacks (red, blue, green), a single lapis cufflink, an electric bulb with a burnt patch on its curve, a box of matches, a china keyhole cover, two indiarubbers, a dead bluebottle and two live ants, running in circles, possibly busy, possibly frantically lost.
    ‘Her habits are filthy,’ says Robin.
    Debbie looks around the studio, which is not the habitation of a tidy man. Apart from the inevitable mess, splashed palettes, drying canvases, jars of water, there are other heaps and dumps. Magazines, opened and closed, wineglasses, beer glasses, bottles, constellations of crayons and pencils, unopened messages from the Income Tax, saucers of clips and pins.
    ‘It is hard for anyone to tell what to leave alone, up here, and what to clear up.’
    ‘No, it isn’t. Dirt is dirt, and personal
things
, things in use, are things in use. All it requires is intelligence.’
    ‘She seems to have found that cufflink you were going on about.’
    ‘I expect I found it myself, and put it down somewhere safe, and she interfered with it.’
    All this is part of a ritual dialogue which Debbie can hardly bear to hear again, let alone to utter her own banal parts of it, and yet she senses it is somehow necessary to their survival. She does not wholly know whether it is necessary because Robin needs to assert himself and win, or because if she does not stand between Robin and Mrs Brown Mrs Brown will leave. She does not need to think about it any more; she turns and hearkens to it, like Donne’s other compass half, like a heliotrope.
    ‘She could see I was painting
exactly
that dish.’
    Indeed, there are sketches in charcoal, in coloured chalks, of exactly that dish, on an expanse of grained wood, propped up around the studio.
    It crosses Debbie’s mind that Mrs Brown used exactly that dish as a picking-up receptacle for exactly that reason. Mrs Brown has her own modes of silent aggression. She does not raise this idea. Robin is neither moved by nor interested