Elementals - A. S. Byatt [1]
The disagreement was about a work called The Windbreak. It was small; about two feet long and one foot deep, framed in a deep, polished dark wooden frame, with brass nails. It was part collage, part oil painting. It was a seaside scene, an English seaside scene, with a blue-grey sea, flecked with dirty white, stretching to meet a pewter sky with livid oily blue patches. These took up the top two-thirds of the work. The beach had real sand scattered on a fawn surface, and tiny real shells and bits of seaside plastic reconstituted into tiny windmills and buckets and spades, sugar-pink, turquoise-blue, poster-red. Much of the left part of the beach was taken up with the windbreak. This was made up of painted cloth, in rainbow stripes, stretched on wooden pegs, representing stakes. There was also a coloured ball, Day-Glo orange with green stars on it. Patricia’s indifferent glance slid over this object; she had seen, in other patches of time, hundreds more or less like it; she moved on to contemplate a delicate six-inch-square dandelion clock on a cobalt-blue ground. Tony, however, was taken with The Windbreak. He went up to it, and peered into its glass box. He stood back and stared. He smiled. Patricia, when he called her, turned back from the dandelion, and saw him smiling.
‘I like this,’ said Tony. ‘I really like this. It isn’t much.’
‘You can’t like that, darling. It’s banal.’
‘No, it’s not. I can see how you might think it was. But it’s not. It’s just simple and it reminds you of things, of whole – of whole – oh, of all those long days of doing nothing on beaches, you know, the mixture of misery and being out in the air and sort of free – of being a child.’
‘Banal, as I said.’
‘Look at it, Pat. It’s a perfectly good complete image of something important. And the colours are good – all the natural things dismal, all the man-made things shining – ’
‘Banal, banal.’ Patricia did not know why she was so irritable. It had been a good lunch. She could even, secretly, see what the memory-box would look like to her if she had liked it, as opposed to disliking it. Tony and the unknown artist shared an emotion, shared a response to the conventional images that evoked that emotion. She didn’t, or if she did, it provoked opposition.
‘I like it,’ said Tony. ‘I’ll buy it, it can go in my study, in that space by the window.’
‘It’s a complete waste of money. You’ll go off it in no time. I don’t want a thing like that in the house. Look at the dreadful predictability of those colours.’
‘Don’t be so snooty. It’s about the dreadful predictability of those colours. About sad English attempts to cheer up sad English landscapes.’
‘They don’t have to be sad. Not the English, not the colours, not the landscapes. It’s a dreadful cliché.’
‘Clichés are moving.’
‘I don’t want it.’
‘I do.’
‘I can’t stop you,’ said Patricia, walking away, past a green maze, past a departing galleon, past a hunt in full cry. She was upset; the good Sunday was threatened by Tony’s bad taste. She turned round to tell him that it didn’t really matter, that of course he should buy the windbreak if he wanted it, and found that she was alone in the upper room. She could hear his heavy tread winding down the stairwell. She would make it up later. Leave a space, make it up later. She turned back to the walls – a blown sheep on moorland, a huge black bull, staring furiously out of the canvas, a fragile bunch of teasels. Later all this would come back, without hypnosis.
It was perhaps half an hour before she went downstairs. She was wearing high-heeled sandals, so she went very carefully round the