Elementals - A. S. Byatt [27]
‘Will you have coffee?’ he said to Melanie in French. He indicated the coffee pot. She bent her head towards it with a quick curving movement, sniffed it, and then hovered briefly over the milk jug.
‘This,’ she said, indicating the hot milk. ‘I will drink this.’
She looked at Bernard with huge black eyes under long lashes.
‘I wish you joy,’ said Bernard in Cévenol French, ‘of your immortal soul.’
‘Hey,’ said Raymond, ‘don’t flirt with my girl in foreign languages.’
‘I don’t flirt,’ said Bernard. ‘I paint.’
‘And we’ll be off after breakfast and leave you to your painting,’ said Raymond. ‘Won’t we, my sweet darling? Melanie wants – Melanie hasn’t got – she didn’t exactly bring – you understand – all her clothes and things. We’re going to go to Cannes and buy some real clothes. Melanie wants to see the film festival and the stars. You won’t mind, old friend, you didn’t want me in the first place. I don’t want to interrupt your painting. Chacun à sa boue, as we used to say in the army, I know that much French.’
Melanie held out her pretty fat hands and turned them over and over with considerable satisfaction. They were pinkly pale and also ornamented with pearly nail-varnish. She did not look at Raymond, simply twisted her head about with what could have been pleasure at his little sallies of physical attention, or could have been irritation. She did not speak. She smiled a little, over her milk, like a satisfied cat, displaying two rows of sweet little pearly teeth between her glossy pink lips.
Raymond’s packing did not take long. Melanie turned out to have one piece of luggage – a large green leather bag full of rattling coins, by the sound. Raymond saw her into the car like a princess, and came back to say goodbye to his friend.
‘Have a good time,’ said Bernard. ‘Beware of philosophers.’
‘Where would I find any philosophers?’ asked Raymond, who had done theatre design at art school with Bernard and now designed sets for a successful children’s TV programme called The A-Mazing Maze of Monsters. ‘Philosophers are extinct. I think your wits are turning, old friend, with stomping around on your own. You need a girlfriend.’
‘I don’t,’ said Bernard. ‘Have a good holiday.’
‘We’re going to be married,’ said Raymond, looking surprised, as though he himself had not known this until he said it. The face of Melanie swam at the car window, the pearly teeth visible inside the soft lips, the dark eyes staring. ‘I must go,’ said Raymond. ‘Melanie’s waiting.’
Left to himself, Bernard settled back into the bliss of solitude. He looked at his latest work and saw that it was good. Encouraged, he looked at his earlier work and saw that that was good, too. All those blues, all those curious questions, all those almost-answers. The only problem was, where to go now. He walked up and down, he remembered the philosopher and laughed. He got out his Keats. He reread the dreadful moment in Lamia where the bride vanished away under the coldly malevolent eye of the sage.
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine – Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made The tender-personed Lamia melt into a shade.
Personally, Bernard said to himself, he had never gone along with Keats about all that stuff. By philosophy Keats seems to mean natural science, and personally he, Bernard, would rather have the optical mysteries of waves and particles in the water and light of the rainbow than any old gnome or fay. He had been at least as interested in the problems of reflection and refraction when he had had the lovely snake in his pool as he had been in its oddity – in its otherness – as snakes went. He hoped that no natural scientist would come along and find Melanie’s blood group to be that of some sort of herpes, or do an X-ray and see something odd in