Songe â la douceur
D’aller la-bas vivre ensemble!
Aimer â loisir
Aimer et mourir
Au pays qui te ressemble!—
Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté
Luxe, calme et volupté.’Dr Himmelblau, whose own life has contained only a modicum of luxe, calme et volupté, is half-moved, halfexasperated by the vatic enthusiasm with which Perry Diss intones these words. She says drily,‘There has always been a resistance to these qualities in Matisse, of course. Feminist critics and artists don’t like him because of the way in which he expands male eroticism into whole placid panoramas of well-being. Marxists don’t like him because he himself said he wanted to paint to please businessmen.’‘Businessmen and intellectuals,’ says Perry Diss.‘Intellectuals don’t make it any more acceptable to Marxists.’‘Look,’ says Perry Diss. ‘Your Miss Nollett wants to shock. She shocks with simple daubings. Matisse was cunning and complex and violent and controlled and he knew he had to know exactly what he was doing. He knew the most shocking thing he could tell people about the purpose of his art was that it was designed to please and to be comfortable. That sentence of his about the armchair is one of the most wickedly provocative things that has ever been said about painting. You can daub the whole of the Centre Pompidou with manure from top to bottom and you will never shock as many people as Matisse did by saying art was like an armchair. People remember that with horror who know nothing about the context—’‘Remind me,’ says Gerda Himmelblau.‘ “What I dream of, is an art of balance, of purity, of quietness, without any disturbing subjects, without worry, which may be, for everyone who works with the mind, for the businessman as much as for the literary artist, something soothing, something to calm the brain, something analogous to a good armchair which relaxes him from his bodily weariness …”‘‘It would be perfectly honourable to argue that that was a very limited view—’ says Gerda Himmelblau.‘Honourable but impercipient. Who is it that understands pleasure, Dr Himmelblau? Old men like me, who can only just remember their bones not hurting, who remember walking up a hill with a spring in their step like the red of the Red Studio. Blind men who have had their sight restored and get giddy with the colours of trees and plastic mugs and the terrible blue of the sky. Pleasure is life, Dr Himmelblau, and most of us don’t have it, or not much, or mess it up, and when we see it in those blues, those roses, those oranges, that vermilion, we should fall down and worship—for it is the thing itself. Who knows a good armchair? A man who has bone-cancer, or a man who has been tortured, he can recognise a good armchair‘And poor Peggi Nolle,’ says Dr Himmelblau. ‘How can she see that, when she mostly wants to die?’‘Someone intent on bringing an action for rape, or whatever she calls it, can’t be all that keen on death. She will want to savour her triumph over her doddering male victim.’‘She is confused, Professor Diss. She puts out messages of all kinds, cries for help, threats …’‘Disgusting art-works—’‘It is truly not beyond her capacities to—to take an overdose and leave a letter accusing you—or me—of horrors, of insensitivity, of persecution—’‘Vengefulness can be seen for what it is. Spite and malice can be seen for what they are.’‘You have a robust confidence in human nature. And you simplify. The despair is as real as the spite. They are part of each other.’‘They are failures of imagination.’‘Of course,’ says Gerda Himmelblau. Of course they are. Anyone who could imagine the terror—the pain—of those who survive a suicide—against whom a suicide is committed—could not carry it through.’Her voice has changed. She knows it has. Perry Diss does not speak but looks at her, frowning slightly. Gerda Himmelblau, driven by some pact she made long ago with accuracy, with truthfulness, says,‘Of course, when one is at that point, imagining others becomes unimaginable. Everything seems clear, and simple, and single; there is only one possible thing to be done—’Perry Diss says,‘That is true. You look around you and everything is bleached, and clear, as you say. You are in a white box, a white room, with no doors or windows. You are looking through clear water with no movement—perhaps it is more like being inside ice, inside the white room. There is only one thing possible. It is all perfectly clear and simple and plain. As you say.’They look at each other. The flood of red has subsided under Perry Diss’s skin. He is thinking. He is quiet.
Any two people may be talking to each other, at any moment, in a civilised way about something trivial, or something, even, complex and delicate. And inside each of the two there runs a kind of dark river of unconnected thought, of secret fear, or violence, or bliss, hoped-for or lost, which keeps pace with the flow of talk and is neither seen nor heard. And at times, one or both of the two will catch sight or sound of this movement, in himself, or herself, or, more rarely, in the other. And it is like the quick slip of a waterfall into a pool, like a drop into darkness. The pace changes, the weight of the air, though the talk may run smoothly onwards without a ripple or quiver.Gerda Himmelblau is back in the knot of quiet terror which has grown in her private self like a cancer over the last few years. She remembers, which she would rather not do, but cannot now control, her friend Kay, sitting in a heavy hospital armchair covered with mock-hide, wearing a long white hospital gown, fastened at the back, and a striped towelling dressing-gown. Kay is not looking at Gerda. Her mouth is set, her eyes are sleepy with drugs. On the white gown are scarlet spots of fresh blood, where needles have injected calm into Kay. Gerda says, ‘Do you remember, we are going to the concert on Thursday?’ and Kay says, in a voice full of stumbling ill-will, ‘No, I don’t, what concert?’ Her eyes flicker, she looks at Gerda and away, there is something malign and furtive in her look. Gerda has loved only one person in her life, her schoolfriend, Kay. Gerda has not married, but Kay has—Gerda was bridesmaid—and Kay has brought up three children. Kay was peaceful and kindly and interested in plants, books, cakes, her husband, her children, Gerda. She was Gerda’s anchor of sanity in a harsh world. As a young woman Gerda was usually described as ‘nervous’ and also as ‘lucky to have Kay Leverett to keep her steady’. Then one day Kay’s eldest daughter was found hanging in her father’s shed. A note had been left, accusing her schoolfellows of bullying. This death was not immediately the death of Kay—these things are crueller and slower. But over the years, Kay’s daughter’s pain became Kay’s, and killed Kay. She said to Gerda once, who did not hear, who remembered only later, ‘I turned on the gas and lay in front of the fire all afternoon, but nothing happened,’ She ‘fell’ from a window, watering a window-box. She was struck a glancing blow by a bus in the street. ‘I just step out now and close my eyes,’ she told Gerda, who said don’t be silly, don’t be unfair to busdrivers. Then there was the codeine overdose. Then the sleeping-pills, hoarded with careful secrecy. And a week after Gerda saw her in the hospital chair, the success, that is to say, the real death.The old Chinese woman clears the meal, the plates veiled with syrupy black-bean sauce, the unwanted cold rice-grains, the uneaten mange-touts.Gerda remembers Kay saying, earlier, when her pain seemed worse and more natural, and must have been so much less, must have been bearable in a way: