Elementals - A. S. Byatt [0]
Title Page
Dedication
Praise
Acknowledgments
Crocodile Tears
A Lamia in the Cévennes
Cold
Baglady
Jael
Christ in the House of Martha and Mary
About the Author
ALSO BY A. S. BYATT
Copyright Page
For Claus Bech
ACCLAIM FOR A. S. BYATT’S
Elementals
“[Byatt’s] prose has a lustrous yet exacting shimmer that answers to Keats’s injunction that poetic language should ‘surprise by a fine excess.’”
—The Boston Globe
“Energetic and magisterial . . . full of light and life.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Sparkling. . . . [Byatt’s] vivid prose leaps and pirouettes, shimmies and shivers.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Harnesses a brilliant new power. . . . Byatt has reached back to legend and fairy tale, elements of storytelling as basic and combustive as fire and ice.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“A collection of richly imagined stories etched in such vivid color, sensuousness, and language that they seem like art objects. . . . A delight.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my Norwegian editor, Birgit Bjerck, for telling me about the one tree, and for information about Peer Gynt. I am also grateful to David Perry for commissioning the ekphrastic tale about Velasquez. My husband, Peter, gave me a central idea about Jael, and Helen Langdon found several images of Jael that were most illuminating. I am, as always, grateful to Jenny Uglow, best of readers, for patience and inspiration. And also, as always, to Gill Marsden for order out of chaos.
The author and publishers are grateful for permission to reproduce the following illustrations:
Nîmes crocodile: from The Crocodile of Nîmes by W. Froehner, Paris, 1872; Sirène by Henri Matisse: from Ronsard’s Florilège des Amours. Collection Musée Matisse. © Succession H. Matisse/DACS 1999; Façon de Venise goblet: © Sotheby’s Picture Library; Jael and Sisera, School of Rembrandt: Kent County Council, from the Kent Master Collection; detail from Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary by Velázquez: © National Gallery, London.
Crocodile Tears
Le Crocodile de Nîmes
Crocodile Tears
Patches of time can be recalled under hypnosis. Not only suppressed terrors but those flickering frames of the continuum that, even at the time, seem certain to be forgotten, pleasantly doomed to nonentity. So they have sunk into our brains after all, are part of us. Patches of time is a mild metaphor, mixing time and space, mildly appropriate in art galleries, where time is difficult to deal with. How do you decide when to stop looking at something? It is not like a book, page after page, page after page, end. You give it your attention, or you don’t. The Nimmos spent their Sundays in those art galleries that had the common sense to open on that dead day. Not the great state galleries, but little ones, where some bright object or image might be collected. They liked buying things, they liked simply looking, they were happily married and harmonious in their stares, on the whole. They engaged a patch of paint and abandoned it, usually simultaneously, they lingered in the same places, considering the same things. Some they remembered, some they forgot, some they carried away to keep.
That Sunday, they were in the Narrow House Gallery, which specialised in minor English art, drawings, prints of flowers, birds, angels, hand-screen landscapes and pop art posters. It was higgledy-piggledy, with real plums in the duff, Tony Nimmo used to say. The Gallery was in Bloomsbury, in what had been an eighteenth-century private house; it went up and up, with small rooms opening off a turning stair, which was also hung with stags and sunsets, garden gates, watering cans and silver lakes with swans on. They always had a good pub lunch on these Sundays. This one was a sunny Sunday in early May, a really sunny Sunday that narrowed the eyes in the light, that warmed the skin, even through glass. Patricia ate prawn salad; she was watching her figure. Tony ate a robust beef and ham platter with pickles and onions. Then he