The Matisse Stories - Antonia S. Byatt [2]
‘I don’t see myself shut in here for the next twenty years. I want more out of life. Life has to have a meaning. I tried Tantric Art and the School of Meditation. Do you know about that sort of thing, about the inner life?’
His fingers flicked and flicked in her hair, he compressed a ridge and scythed it.
‘Not really. I’m an agnostic.’
‘I’d like to know about art. You know about art. You know about that pink nude, don’t you? How do I find out?’
She told him to read Lawrence Gowing, and he clamped the tress he was attending to, put down his scissors, and wrote it all down in a little dove-grey leather book. She told him where to find good extra-mural classes and who was good among the gallery lecturers.
Next time she came it was not art, it was archaeology. There was no evidence that he had gone to the galleries or read the books.
‘The past pulls you,’ he said. ‘Bones in the ground and gold coins in a hoard, all that. I went down to the City and saw them digging up the Mithraic temples. There’s a religion, all that bull’s blood, dark and light, fascinating.’
She wished he would tidy her head and be quiet. She could recognise the flitting mind, she considered. It frightened her. What she knew, what she cared about, what was coherent, was separate shards for him to flit over, remaining separate. You wrote books and gave lectures, and these little ribbons of fact shone briefly and vanished.
‘I don’t want to put the best years of my life into making suburban old dears presentable,’ he said. ‘I want something more.’
‘What?’ she said, meeting his brooding stare above the wet mat of her mop. He puffed foam into it and said, ‘Beauty, I want beauty. I must have beauty. I want to sail on a yacht among the Greek isles, with beautiful people.’ He caught her eye. ‘And see those temples and those sculptures.’ He pressed close, he pushed at the nape of her neck, her nose was near his discreet zip.
‘You’ve been washing it without conditioner,’ he said. ‘You aren’t doing yourself any good. I can tell.’
She bent her head submissively, and he scraped the base of her skull.
‘You could have highlights,’ he said in a tone of no enthusiasm. ‘Bronze or mixed autumnal.’
‘No thanks. I prefer it natural.’
He sighed.
He began to tell her about his love life. She would have inclined, on the evidence before her eyes, to the view that he was homosexual. The salon was full of beautiful young men, who came, wielded the scissors briefly, giggled together in corners, and departed. Chinese, Indonesian, Glaswegian, South African. He shouted at them and giggled with them, they exchanged little gifts and paid off obscure little debts to each other. Once she came in late and found them sitting in a circle, playing poker. The girls were subordinate and brightly hopeless. None of them lasted long. They wore—in those days—pink overalls with cream silk bindings. She could tell he had a love life because of the amount of time he spent alternately pleasing and blustering on the telephone, his voice a blotting-paper hiss, his words inaudible, though she could hear the peppery rattle of the other voice, or voices, in the ear-piece. Her sessions began to take a long time, what with these phone calls and with his lengthy explanations, which he would accompany with gestures, making her look at his mirrored excitement, like a boy riding a bicycle with hands off.
‘Forgive me if I’m a bit distracted,’ he said. ‘My life is in crisis. Something I never believed could happen has happened. All my life I’ve been looking for something and now I’ve found it.’
He wiped suds casually from her wet brow and scraped her eye-corner. She blinked.
‘Love,’ he said. ‘Total affinity. Absolute compatibility. A miracle. My other half. A perfectly beautiful girl.’
She could think of no sentence to answer this. She said, schoolmistressy, what other tone was there? ‘And this has caused the crisis?’
‘She loves me, I couldn’t believe it but it