The Matisse Stories - Antonia S. Byatt [3]
‘And your wife?’
There was a wife, who had thought nothing to the purchase of the Rosy Nude.
‘She told me to get out of the house. So I got out. I went to her flat—my girlfriend’s. She came and fetched me back—my wife. She said I must choose, but she thinks I’ll choose her. I said it would be better for the moment just to let it evolve. I told her how do I know what I want, in this state of ecstasy, how do I know it’ll last, how do I know she’ll go on loving me?’
He frowned impatiently and waved the scissors dangerously near her temples.
‘All she cares about is respectability. She says she loves me but all she cares about is what the neighbours say. I like my house, though. She keeps it nice, I have to say. It’s not stylish, but it is in good taste.’
Over the next few months, maybe a year, the story evolved, in bumps and jerks, not, it must be said, with any satisfactory narrative shape. He was a very bad storyteller, Susannah realised slowly. None of the characters acquired any roundness. She formed no image of the nature of the beauty of the girlfriend, or of the way she spent her time when not demonstrating her total affinity for Lucían. She did not know whether the wife was a shrew or a sufferer, nervous or patient or even ironically detached. All these wraith-personae were inventions of Susannah’s own. About six months through the narrative Lucian said that his daughter was very upset about it all, the way he was forced to come and go, sometimes living at home, sometimes shut out.
‘You have a daughter?’
‘Fifteen. No, seventeen, I always get ages wrong!’
She watched him touch his own gleaming hair in the mirror, and smile apprehensively at himself.
‘We were married very young,’ he said. ‘Very young, before we knew what was what.’
‘It’s hard on young girls, when there are disputes at home.’
‘It is. It’s hard on everyone. She says if I sell the house she’ll have nowhere to live while she takes her exams. I have to sell the house if I’m to afford to keep up my half of my girlfriend’s flat. I can’t keep up the mortgages on both. My wife doesn’t want to move. It’s understandable, I suppose, but she has to see we can’t go on like this. I can’t be torn apart like this, I’ve got to decide.’
‘You seem to have decided for your girlfriend.’
He took a deep breath and put down everything, comb, scissors, hairdryer.
‘Ah, but I’m scared. I’m scared stiff if I take the plunge, I’ll be left with nothing. If she’s got me all the time, my girlfriend, perhaps she won’t go on loving me like this. And I like my house, you know, it feels sort of comfortable to me, I’m used to it, all the old chairs. I don’t quite like to think of it all sold and gone.’
‘Love isn’t easy.’
‘You can say that again.’
‘Do you think I’m getting thinner on top?’
‘What? Oh no, not really, I wouldn’t worry. We’ll just train this little bit to fall across there like that. Do you think she has a right to more than half the value of the house?’
‘I’m not a lawyer. I’m a classicist.’
‘We’re going on that Greek holiday. Me and my girlfriend. Sailing through the Greek Isles. I’ve bought scuba gear. The salon will be closed for a month.’
‘I’m glad you told me.’
While he was away the salon was redecorated. He had not told her about this, also, as indeed, why should he have done? It was done very fashionably in the latest colours, battleship-grey and maroon. Dried blood and instruments of slaughter, Susannah thought on her return. The colour scheme was one she particularly disliked. Everything was changed. The blue trollies had been replaced with hi-tech steely ones, the ceiling lowered, the faintly aquarial plate glass was replaced with storm-grey-one-way-see-through-no-glare which made even bright days dull ones. The music was now muted heavy metal. The young men and young women wore dark grey Japanese wrappers and what she thought of as the patients, which included herself, wore identical maroon ones. Her face in the mirror was grey, had lost the deceptive rosy haze of the earlier lighting.
The