The Matisse Stories - Antonia S. Byatt [9]
On Debbie’s walls, which are lemon-coloured, are photographs of Natasha and Jamie as naked babies, and later, gap-toothed, grinning school heads and shoulders, a series of very small woodcuts, illustrating fairy tales, a mermaid, an old witch with a spindle, a bear and two roses, and in a quite different style a small painting of a table, a hyper-realist wooden table with a blue vase and a small Rubik’s cube on it. Also, in white frames, two paintings done by a younger Natasha, a vase of anemones, watery crimsons and purples, a dress flung over a chair, blue dress, grey chair, promising folds, in a probably unintentional void.
Debbie types, and cocks her head for the sound of the doorbell. She types ‘a peculiarly luscious new purple, like bilberry juice with a little cream swirled in it’. She jumps at the sound not of the doorbell but of her telephone, one of the new fluttering burrs, disconcertingly high-pitched. It is her editor, asking when she will be able to make a layout conference. She speaks, placating, explaining, just sketching in an appeal for sympathy. The editor of A Woman’s Place is a man, who reads and slightly despises the pieces about the guilt of the working mother which his periodical periodically puts out. Debbie changes tack, and makes him laugh with a description of where poor Jamie’s spots have managed to sprout. ‘Poor little bugger,’ quacks the editor into Debbie ‘s ear, inaudible to the rest of the house.
Up and down the stairs, joining all three floors, surges a roaring and wheezing noise, a rhythmic and complex and swelling crescendo, snorting, sucking, with a high-pitched drone planing over a kind of grinding sound, interrupted every now and then by a frenetic rattle, accompanied by a new, menacing whine. Behind the Hoover, upwards and downwards, comes Mrs Brown, without whom, it must immediately be said, Debbie’s world would not hold together.
Mrs Brown came ten years ago, in answer to an advertisement in the local paper. Natasha was four, and Jamie was on the way. Debbie was unwell and at her wits’ end, with fear of losing her job. She put ‘artistic family’ in the advertisement, expecting perhaps to evoke some tolerance, if not positive affection, for the tattered wallpaper and burgeoning mess. She didn’t have much response—a couple of art students, one an unmarried mum who wanted to share babysitting, painting-time, and chores, a very old, purblind, tortoise-paced ex-parlourmaid, and Mrs Brown. Mrs Brown had a skin which was neither black nor brown but a kind of amber yellow, the sort of yellow bruises go, before they vanish, but all over. She had a lot of wiry soot-coloured hair, which rose, like the crown of a playing-card king, out of a bandeau of flowery material, tied tightly about her brow, like the towelling of a tennis star, or the lace cap of an oldfashioned maid. Mrs Brown’s clothes were, and are, flowery and surprising, jumble sale remnants, rejects and ends of lines, rainbow-coloured jumpers made from the ping-pong-ball-sized unwanted residues of other people’s knitting. She came for her interview in a not too clean (but not too dirty) film-star’s trench-coat, which she didn’t take off until Debbie had said, dry-mouthed with anxiety, ‘I think you and I might manage to get on, don’t you?’ And Mrs Brown had nodded decisively, accepted a cup of coffee, and divested herself of the trench-coat, revealing pantaloons made of some kind of thick cream-coloured upholstery linen, wonderfully traversed by crimson open-mouthed Indian flowers and birds of paradise and tendrils of unearthly creepers, and a royal-blue jumper embroidered all over with woollen daisies, white marguerites, orange black-eyed Susans.
Mrs Brown does not smile very much. Her face has some resemblance to a primitive mask, cheeks in triangular planes, long, straight, salient nose, a mouth usually tightly closed. Her expression can be read as prim, or grim, or watchful or perhaps—though this is not the first idea that comes to mind