The Matisse Stories - Antonia S. Byatt [34]
‘It matters very much and not at all,’ says Perry Diss. ‘She may see the light. Who knows?’
They leave the restaurant together. Perry Diss thanks Dr Himmelblau for his food and for her company. She is inwardly troubled. Something has happened to her white space, to her inner ice, which she does not quite understand. Perry Diss stops at the glass box containing the lobster, the crabs, the scallops—these last now decidedly dead, filmed with an iridescent haze of imminent putrescence. The lobster and the crabs are all still alive, all, more slowly, hissing their difficult air, bubbling, moving feet, feelers, glazing eyes. Inside Gerda Himmelblau’s ribs and cranium she experiences, in a way, the pain of alien fish-flesh contracting inside an exo-skeleton. She looks at the lobster and the crabs, taking accurate distant note of the loss of gloss, the attenuation of colour.
‘I find that absolutely appalling, you know,’ says Perry Diss. ‘And at the same time, exactly at the same time, I don’t give a damn? D’you know?’
‘I know,’ says Gerda Himmelblau. She does know. Cruelly, imperfectly, voluptuously, clearly. The muzak begins again. ‘Oh what a beautiful morning. Oh what a beautiful day’ She reaches up, in a completely uncharacteristic gesture, and kisses Perry Diss’s soft cheek.
‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘For everything.’
‘Look after yourself,’ says Perry Diss.
‘Oh,’ says Gerda Himmelblau. ‘I will. I will.’
ALSO BY A. S. BYATT
POSSESSION
Winner of England’s Booker Prize and a literary sensation, Possession is both an exhilarating intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73590-9
ANGELS & INSECTS
Two Novellas
In “Morpho Eugenia,” a shipwrecked naturalist is rescued by a family whose clandestine passions come to seem as inscrutable as the behavior of insects. In “The Conjugial Angel,” a circle of fictional mediums finds itself haunted by the ghost of a historical personage.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-75134-3
PASSIONS OF THE MIND
Thoughtfully and stylishly, A. S. Byatt considers the parallels between George Eliot and Willa Cather; Robert Browning’s spiritual malaise and the mythic strands in the novels of Saul Bellow and Iris Murdoch; and other matters of art and intellect both past and present.
Literary Criticism/Literature/0-679-73678-6
THE GAME
A story of two sisters, Cassandra and Julia, once close, but now hostile strangers. Confronted by a man from their past, who they once both loved and suffered over, they struggle with each other toward a denouement that is both shocking and as inevitable as a classical tragedy.
FÎction/Literature/0-679-74256-5
SUGAR AND OTHER STORIES
This dazzling collection of short fiction explores the fragile ties between generations, the dizzying abyss of loss, and the elaborate memories we construct against it.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-74227-1
THE VIRGIN IN THE GARDEN
A wonderfully erudite entertainment about a brilliant and eccentric family, in which enlightenment and sexuality, Elizabethan drama and contemporary comedy, intersect richly and unpredictably.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73829-0
Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:
1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, APRIL 1996
Copyright © 1993 by A. S. Byatt
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York, for permission to reprint the following three black-and-white line drawings by Henri Matisse : La Chevelure, Nymphe et faune, and L’Artiste et le modèle reflétés dans le miroir. Copyright © 1995
Succession H. Matisse, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:
Byatt, A. S. (Antonia Susan)