Elementals - A. S. Byatt [20]
‘You could send them a postcard.’
‘A postcard?’
‘For a beginning. You could send it from Oslo or Stockholm. Or Trondheim.’
‘You are going back?’
‘Not permanently. Just to find out – what became of the old lady.’
Patricia had not been quite sure until that moment that the old lady was not an invention. She stood in the green English churchyard, staring at the glittering expanse of white chips framed in a white stone square. She remembered Nîmes, like a hot blue and golden ball, containing creamy stone cylinders and cubes. She thought of the unknown North, the green fjords, the ice, the lights, the one tree. She said:
‘You would like me to accompany you?’
Nils Isaksen shuffled his ungainly feet on the moist path.
‘I would not take up too much of your time. But yes, I should be grateful. Then – in that case – it becomes possible.’
‘Then I will come,’ said Patricia Nimmo.
They walked slowly away, side by side.
A Lamia in the Cévennes
Sirène, Henri Matisse, 1948
A Lamia in the Cévennes
In the mid-1980s Bernard Lycett-Kean decided that Thatcher’s Britain was uninhabitable, a land of dog-eat-dog, lung-corroding ozone and floating money, of which there was at once far too much and far too little. He sold his West Hampstead flat and bought a small stone house on a Cévenol hillside. He had three rooms, and a large barn, which he weatherproofed, using it as a studio in winter and a storehouse in summer. He did not know how he would take to solitude, and laid in a large quantity of red wine, of which he drank a good deal at first, and afterwards much less. He discovered that the effect of the air and the light and the extremes of heat and cold were enough, indeed too much, without alcohol. He stood on the terrace in front of his house and battled with these things, with mistral and tramontane and thunderbolts and howling clouds. The Cévennes is a place of extreme weather. There were also days of white heat, and days of yellow heat, and days of burning blue heat. He produced some paintings of heat and light, with very little else in them, and some other paintings of the small river which ran along the foot of the steep, terraced hill on which his house stood; these were dark green and dotted with the bright blue of the kingfisher and the electric blue of the dragonflies.
These paintings he packed in his van and took to London and sold for largish sums of the despised money. He went to his own Private View and found he had lost the habit of conversation. He stared and snorted. He was a big man, a burly man, his stare seemed aggressive when it was largely baffled. His old friends were annoyed. He himself found London just as rushing and evil-smelling and unreal as he had been imagining it. He hurried back to the Cévennes. With his earnings, he built himself a swimming-pool, where once there had been a patch of baked mud and a few bushes.
It is not quite right to say he built it. It was built by the Jardinerie Émeraude, two enterprising young men, who dug and lined and carried mud and monstrous stones, and built a humming power-house full of taps and pipes and a swirling cauldron of filter-sand. The pool was blue, a swimming-pool blue, lined with a glittering tile mosaic, and with a mosaic dolphin cavorting amiably in its depths, a dark blue dolphin with a pale blue eye. It was not a boring rectangular pool, but an irregular oval triangle, hugging the contour of the terrace on which it lay. It had a white stone rim, moulded to the hand, delightful to touch when it was hot in the sun.
The two young men were surprised that Bernard wanted it blue. Blue was a little moche, they thought. People now were making pools steel-grey or emerald-green, or even dark wine-red. But Bernard’s mind was full of blue dots now visible across the southern mountains when you travelled from Paris to Montpellier by air. It was a recalcitrant blue, a blue that asked to be painted by David Hockney and only by David Hockney. He felt something else could and must be done with that blue. It was a blue he needed to know and fight.