The Matisse Stories - Antonia S. Byatt [4]
‘Did you have a good holiday?’
Oh idyllic. Oh yes, a dream. I wish I hadn’t come back. She’s been to a solicitor. Claiming the matrimonial home for all the work she’s done on it, and because of my daughter. I say, what about when she grows up, she’ll get a job, won’t she? You can’t assume she’ll hang around mummy for ever, they don’t.’
‘I need to look particularly good this time. I’ve won a prize. A Translator’s Medal. I have to make a speech. On television.’
‘We’ll have to make you look lovely, won’t we? For the honour of the salon. How do you like our new look?’
‘It’s very smart.’
‘It is. It is. I’m not quite satisfied with the photos, though. I thought we could get something more intriguing. It has to be photos to go with the grey.’
He worked above her head. He lifted her wet hair with his fingers and let the air run through it, as though there was twice as much as there was. He pulled a twist this way, and clamped it to her head, and screwed another that way, and put his head on one side and another, contemplating her uninspiring bust. When her head involuntarily followed his he said quite nastily, ‘Keep still, can you, I can’t work if you keep bending from side to side like a swan.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No harm done, just keep still.’
She kept still as a mouse, her head bowed under his repressing palm. She turned up her eyes and saw him look at his watch, then, with a kind of balletic movement of wrists, scissors and finger-points above her brow, drive the sharp steel into the ball of his thumb, so that blood spurted, so that some of his blood even fell on to her scalp.
Oh dear. Will you excuse me? I’ve cut myself. Look.’
He waved the bloody member before her nose.
‘I saw,’ she said. ‘I saw you cut yourself.’
He smiled at her in the mirror, a glittery smile, not meeting her eyes.
‘It’s a little trick we hairdressers have. When we’ve been driving ourselves and haven’t had time for a bite or a breather, we get cut, and off we go, to the toilet, to take a bite of Mars Bar or a cheese roll if the receptionist’s been considerate. Will you excuse me? I am faint for lack of food.’
‘Of course,’ she said.
He flashed his glass smile at her and slid away.
She waited. A little water dripped into her collar. A little more ran into her eyebrows. She looked at her poor face, under its dank cap and its two random corkscrews, aluminium clamped. She felt a gentle protective rage towards this stolid face. She remembered, not as a girl, as a young woman under all that chestnut fall, looking at her skin, and wondering how it could grow into the crepe, the sag, the opulent soft bags. This was her face, she had thought then. And this, too, now, she wanted to accept for her face, trained in a respect for precision, and could not. What had left this greying skin, these flakes, these fragile stretches with no elasticity, was her, was her life, was herself. She had never been a beautiful woman, but she had been attractive, with the attraction of liveliness and warm energy, of the flow of quick blood and brightness of eye. No classic bones, which might endure, no fragile bird-like sharpness that might whitely go forward. Only the life of flesh, which began to die.
She was in a panic of fear about the television, which had come too late, when she had lost the desire to be seen or looked at. The cameras search jowl and eye-pocket, expose brush-stroke and