Elementals - A. S. Byatt [25]
‘You are a very beautiful snake,’ replied Bernard courteously, watching the absurd eyelashes dip and lift.
‘I am not entirely a snake. I am an enchanted spirit, a Lamia. If you will kiss my mouth, I will become a most beautiful woman, and if you will marry me, I will be eternally faithful and gain an immortal soul. I will also bring you power, and riches, and knowledge you never dreamed of. But you must have faith in me.’
Bernard turned over on his side, and floated, disentangling his brown legs from the twining coloured coils. The snake sighed.
‘You do not believe me. You find my present form too loathsome to touch. I love you. I have watched you for months and I love and worship your every movement, your powerful body, your formidable brow, the movements of your hands when you paint. Never in all my thousands of years have I seen so perfect a male being. I will do anything for you – ’
‘Anything?’
‘Oh, anything. Ask. Do not reject me.’
‘What I want,’ said Bernard, swimming towards the craggy end of the pool, with the snake stretched out behind him, ‘what I want, is to be able to paint your portrait, as you are, for certain reasons of my own, and because I find you very beautiful – if you would consent to remain here for a little time, as a snake – with all these amazing colours and lights – if I could paint you in my pool – just for a little time – ’
‘And then you will kiss me, and we will be married, and I shall have an immortal soul.’
‘Nobody nowadays believes in immortal souls,’ said Bernard.
‘It does not matter if you believe in them or not,’ said the snake. ‘You have one and it will be horribly tormented if you break your pact with me.’
Bernard did not point out that he had not made a pact, not having answered her request yes or no. He wanted quite desperately that she should remain in his pool, in her present form, until he had solved the colours, and was almost prepared for a Faustian damnation.
There followed a few weeks of hectic activity. The Lamia lingered agreeably in the pool, disposing herself wherever she was asked, under or on the water, in figures of three or six or eight or O, in spirals and tight coils. Bernard painted and swam and painted and swam. He swam less since he found the Lamia’s wreathing flirtatiousness oppressive, though occasionally to encourage her, he stroked her sleek sides, or wound her tail round his arm or his arm round her tail. He never painted her head, which he found hideous and repulsive. Bernard liked snakes but he did not like women. The Lamia with female intuition began to sense his lack of enthusiasm for this aspect of her. ‘My teeth,’ she told him, ‘will be lovely in rosy lips, my eyes will be melting and mysterious in a human face. Kiss me, Bernard, and you will see.’
‘Not yet, not yet,’ said Bernard.
‘I will not wait for ever,’ said the Lamia.
Bernard remembered where he had, so to speak, seen her before. He looked her up one evening in Keats, and there she was, teeth, eyelashes, frecklings, streaks and bars, sapphires, greens, amethyst and rubious-argent. He had always found the teeth and eyelashes repulsive and had supposed Keats was as usual piling excess on excess. Now he decided Keats must have seen one himself, or read someone who had, and felt the same mixture of aesthetic frenzy and repulsion. Mary Douglas, the anthropologist, says that mixed things, neither flesh nor fowl, so to speak, always excite repulsion and prohibition. The poor Lamia was a mess, as far as her head went. Her beseeching eyes were horrible. He looked up from his reading and saw her snake-face peering sadly in at the window, her halo shimmering, her teeth shining like pearls. He saw to his locks: he was not about to be accidentally kissed in his sleep. They were each other’s prisoners, he and she. He would paint his painting and think how to escape.
The painting was getting somewhere. The snake-colours were a fourth term in the equation pool>sky>mountains-trees>paint. Their movement in the aquamarines linked and divided delectably, firing the