The Matisse Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

in Mrs Brown’s feelings.
    ‘Shall I take them all and throw them away in the bin in my study, darling? And dust your bowl for you?’
    ‘Wait a minute. Those are quite all right rubber bands. I was using that bread for rubbing out. The matches are OK, nothing wrong with them. Some of us can’t afford to throw good tools away, you know.’
    ‘Where shall I put them?’
    ‘Just stick them on the table over there. I’ll see to them myself. Dust the bowl, please.’
    Debbie does as he asks, abstracting the cufflink, which she will return to his dressing-table. She looks at her husband, who glares back at her, and then gives a smile, like a rueful boy. He is a long, thin, unsubstantial man in jeans and a fisherman’s smock, with big joints, knuckles and wrists and ankles, like an adolescent, which he is not. He has a very English face, long and fine and pink and white, like a worried colt. His soft hair is pushed up all round his head like a hedgehog and is more or less the same colour as one. His eyes are an intense blue, like speedwells. A photographer could choose between making him look like a gentle mystic and making him look like a dedicated cricketer. A painter could choose between a haziness at the edges, always light, never heavy, and very clear sketched-in features,bones, a brow, a chin, a clearcut nose, in a kind of pale space.
    ‘You
have
managed to make her understand about the fetishes.’
    ‘It took long enough,’ he grumbles. ‘I even gave her lectures on tones and complementary colours, I just
stood
there with the things and showed her.’
    ‘I should think that was interesting for her.’
    ‘She should know her job, without all that fuss. Anyway, it worked, I grant you that it worked.’
    ‘I must go, darling, the doctor’s here. Do you want coffee when he’s gone, shall I bring you a mug?’
    ‘Yes please. That will be nice.’
    He is not apologising, but the ritual confrontation is over. Debbie kisses him. His cheek is soft. She says,
    ‘Have you heard from that girl from the Callisto Gallery, yet?’
    ‘I don’t think she’ll come. I don’t think she ever meant to come.’
    ‘Yes, she did,’ said Debbie. ‘I talked to her, too. She really liked that blue and yellow plate picture Toby has got in his loo. She said she didn’t think much of Toby’staste in general, but that was exquisite, she said, she said she just sat there staring at it and caused an awful queue!’
    ‘She was probably drunk.’
    ‘Don’t be
silly
, Robin. She’ll turn up, I know. I don’t say things I don’t mean, do I?’
    Debbie doesn’t know whether the girl, Shona McRury, will turn up or not, but she says she will, with force, because it is better for her, as well as for Robin, if he is in a hopeful mood. Deborah loves Robin. She has loved him since they met at Art School, where she studied Graphic Design and he studied Fine Art. She wanted to be a wood-engraver and illustrate children’s books. What she loved about Robin was the quality of his total dedication to his work, which had a certain austere separateness from everyone else’s work. Those were the days of the sixties, in fact the early seventies, when much painting was abstract, washes of colour and no colour, geometric patterns, games with the nature of canvas and pigment and the colours of light and their effect on the eye. Robin was a neo-realist before neo-realism. He painted what he saw, metal surfaces, wooden surfaces, plaster surfaces, with hallucinatory skill and accuracy.
    He painted expanses of neutral colours—wooden planks, glass table-tops, beige linen, crumbling plaster, and somewhere, somewhere unexpected, not quite in a corner, not quite in the centre, not where the folds were pulling from or the planks ran, he painted something very small and very brilliant, a glass ball, a lustre vase, a bouquet of bone china flowers (never anything alive), a heap of feathers. It was just this side of kitsch, then and now. It could have been