Elementals - A. S. Byatt [4]
After breakfast Patricia went out. The hotel looked across the Quai de la Fontaine to the Jardin de la Fontaine, a landscaped eighteenth-century space, with orderly terraces, stone stairs, balustrades and carved fauns and nymphs. The houses along the quai are dignified, heavy, eighteenth-century, barred and shuttered. A wide channel of green water runs under bridges, under high plane trees, along the quai. In the distance a fountain rose and shone in a high foaming spray. Patricia turned the other way, into the narrow streets, crossing a wide boulevard. The buildings are close together, made of warm cream and gold stone, with roofs of overlapping terracotta tiles. Patricia walked. She walked between heat and shade, from cool stony courts to sudden bright squares, between heavy carved doorways into white spaces where she blinked and saw water. She saw many fountains, pouring from huge stone mouths, trickling over stones, bubbling in circular pools around bronze figures or flowing along channels. Once she saw a high sculpted crested monumental spout in the centre of a grassy place she did not cross, turning back into the small streets. She began also to notice crocodiles on bronze studs in the streets, the reptile chained to a palm tree. The same motif was repeated in windows, on street signs. A life-sized bronze monster crawled over the edge of a fountain in a quiet square. She sat beside the water, under a parasol, and ordered a coffee. She was a girl, a girl on her first solitary trip abroad. She stared at the energetic bronze claws and curving tail, as she had stared at the golden stones and the blue sky and the shadows, curious and indifferent. ‘Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your mud by the operation of your sun: so is your crocodile.’ He had played Lepidus. He had wanted to play Antony but had had to be content with Lepidus. She remembered, with her fingertips, smoothing artificial sun-tan into his white English tennis-playing thighs, sinewy and pale. She remembered the toga. She stood up again, leaving her coffee untouched, and began to walk. She stepped lightly, like a girl.
She shopped. She bought a pair of flat white sandals, two pairs of linen trousers, and some floating dresses in airy cotton, painted with dark purple grapes on a yellow that was French, a mustardy ochre-yellow, not like the daffodil-yellow of the bright suit she had travelled in. In the Rue de l’Aspic she found an elegant bathroom boutique and spent time in front of mirrors holding up lawn nightshirts printed with seashells, gowns sprigged with mimosa on glazed cotton, a classical column of falling white silk jersey pleats, which she bought, adding a pretty pair of golden slippers, and a honeycomb cotton robe, in aquamarine. These things gave her pleasure. She told the proprietor, an elegant young woman with dark hair and eyes, and a Roman nose, that she herself was in the business. She spoke a slow, clear, grammatical French. She had meant to be a theatre designer; they had all been theatre-mad, at university; but she had made a success of Anadyomene instead. She admired a treasure-cavern full of translucent beakers in sand-blasted glass, rosy, nacreous, powder-blue, duck-egg. She bought a gold-and-silver striped toothbrush. She went out and walked. She went back to the hotel, and ate lunch on the terrace, in the dappled garden, listening to the steady plash of the fountain. She went upstairs, arranged her purchases in cupboards and drawers, closed out the afternoon heat with the heavy shutters, and slept, curled on the counter-pane. In the evening she took a bath, dressed in her new dress, and went down to dine on the terrace. There were stars and a new moon in an indigo sky. The fountain was lit from underneath, like a moving cube of glass or ice, white with blue shadows. An owl called. She had a floating candle on her table in a tall-stemmed glass cup. She saw these things with the pleasure of a post-war girl. She ate a salad of avocados and fruits de mer, arranged