Art Work

In 1947 Matisse painted Le Silence habité des maisons. It is reproduced in Sir Lawrence Gowing’s Matisse, only very small and in black and white. Two people sit at the corner of a table. The mother, it may be, has a reflective chin propped on a hand propped on the table. The child, it may be, turns the page of a huge white book, whose arch of paper makes an integral curve with his/her lower arm. In front, a vase of flowers. Behind, six huge panes of window, behind them, a mass of trees and perhaps sunlight. The people’s faces are perfect blank ovals, featureless. Up above them, in the top lefthand corner of the canvas, level with the top of the window, is a chalked outline, done as it might be by a child, of a round on a stalk, above bricks. It is a pity there are no colours but it is possible, tempting, to imagine them, sumptuous as they were in what Gowing says was ‘the reconciliation which is only within the reach of great painters in old age’. The pictures, Gowing says, have extraordinary virility. ‘At last Matisse is wholly at ease with the fierce impulse.’ It is a dark little image on the page, charcoal-grey, slate-grey, soft pale pencil-grey, subdued, demure. We may imagine it flaming, in carmine or vermilion, or swaying in indigo darkness, or perhaps—outdoors—gold and green. We may imagine it. The darkness of the child may be black on black or black on blue or blue on some sort of red. The book is white. Who is the watching totem under the ceiling?

There is an inhabited silence in 49 Alma Road, in the sense that there are no voices, though there are various sounds, some of them even pervasive and raucous sounds, which an unconcerned ear might construe as the background din of a sort of silence. There is the churning hum of the washing-machine, a kind of splashy mechanical giggle, with a grinding note in it, tossing its wet mass one way, resting and simmering, tossing it the other. A real habitué of this noise will tense him or herself against the coming banshee-scream of the spin-cycle, accompanied by a drumming tattoo of machine feet scrabbling on the tiles.

The dryer is chuntering too. It is not a new dryer, its carbon brushes are worn, it thumps and creaks and screeches in its slow circling. The mass of cloth inside it flails, flops with a crash, rises, flails, flops with a crash. An attentive ear could hear the difference in the texture and mass of the flop as the sleeves and stockings are bound into sausages and balls by the fine straps of petticoats and bras.

In the front room, chanting to itself, for no one is watching it, the television is full on in mid-morning. Not loudly, there are rules about noise. The noise it is making is the wilfully upbeat cheery squitter of female presenters of children’s TV, accented with regular, repetitive amazement, mixed in with the grunts and cackles and high-pitched squeaks of a flock of furry puppets, a cross-eyed magenta haystack with a snout, a kingfisher blue gerbil with a whirling tail, a torpid emerald green coiled serpent, with a pillar-box red dangling tongue and movable fringed eyelids. At regular intervals, between the bouts of presenter-squitter and puppet snorts and squawks, comes, analogous to the spin-cycle, the musical outbursts, a drumroll, a squeal on a woodwind, a percussion battery, a ta-ta ta TA, for punctuation, for a roseate full-frame with a lime-coloured logo T-NE-TV.

On the first floor, behind a closed door, the circular rush and swish of Jamie’s electric trains can be heard. Nothing can be heard of Natasha’s record-player, and Natasha cannot hear the outside world, for her whole head is stuffed with beating vibrations and exploding howls and ululations. She lies on her bed and twitches in rhythm. Anyone coming in could well hear, from the other side of the corridor, the twangling tinny bumps made by the baffled sound trying to break out of its boxer-glove packaging. Natasha’s face has the empty beatific intelligence of some of Matisse’s supine women. Her face is white and oval and luminous with youth. Her hair is inky blue-black, and fanned across her not-too-clean pillows. Her bedspread is jazzy black forms of ferns or seaweeds, on a scarlet ground, forms the textile designer would never have seen, without Matisse. Her arms and legs dangle beyond the confines of the ruffled rectangle of this spread, too gawky to be an odalisque, but just as delicious in their curves. White, limp, relaxed, twitching. Twitches can’t be painted.

From Debbie’s room comes the sound of the typewriter. It is an old mechanical typewriter, its noises are metallic and clicking. It chitters on to the end of a line, then there is the clash of the return, and the musical, or almost musical ‘cling’ of the little bell. Tap tap tap tap tappety tappety tappety clash cling tappety tap tap. A silence. Debbie sits over her typewriter with her oval chin in her long hands, and her black hair coiled gracefully in her neck. It is easy to see where Natasha’s ink and ivory beauty comes from. Debbie frowns. She taps a tooth (ivory lacquer, a shade darker than the skin) with an oval nail, rose madder. Debbie’s office, or study, is very cramped. There is a drawing-board, but if it is not in use, it is blocked up against the window, obscuring much of the light, and all of the vision of pillar-box red geraniums and cobalt-blue lobelias in a window box on the sill. Debbie can work at her desk or work at her drawing-board, but not both at once, though she would like to be able to, she is the design editor of A Woman’s Place, of which the, perhaps obscure, premise is that a woman’s place is not only, perhaps not even primarily, in the Home. Debbie is working at home at the moment because Jamie has chicken pox and the doctor is coming, and the doctor cannot say at what time he will or won’t call, there is too much pressure. Jamie has the same inky hair as his mother and sister, and has even longer blacker lashes over black eyes. He has the same skin too, but at the moment it is a wonderfully humped and varied terrain of rosy peaks and hummocks, mostly the pink of those boring little begonias with fleshy leaves, but some raging into salmon-deeps and some extinct volcanoes, with umber and ochre crusts. It was Jamie who was watching the TV but he cannot stick at anything, he itches too wildly, he tears at his flesh with his bitten-down nails, he rubs himself against chairs. Debbie stood him on a coffee table and swabbed and painted him with calamine lotion, creating a kind of streaked sugar or plaster of Paris mannikin, with powdery pinky-beige crude surfaces, rough make-up, failed paint, a dull bland colour, under which the bumpy buds of the pox heated themselves into re-emergence. ‘War-paint,’ Debbie said to her son, squeezing and stippling the liquid on his round little belly, between his poor hot legs. ‘You could put stripes of cocoa on,’ said Jamie. ‘And icing sugar. That would make three colours of stripes.’ Debbie would have liked to paint him all over, with fern-green cake dye and cochineal, if that would have distracted or assuaged him, but she had to get the piece she was writing done, which was about the new wave of kitchen plastic design, wacky colours, staggering new streamlined shapes.

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—perhaps resigned. She likes to go barefoot in the house, it turns out—she is not used to this level of heating, she explains, implying—or does Debbie misread her?—that the heating is an unhealthy extravagance. She comes up behind you with no warning, and at first this used to irritate Debbie most frightfully, but now she is used to it, she is used to Mrs Brown, her most powerful emotion in relation to Mrs Brown is terror that she will leave. If Mrs Brown is not Debbie’s friend, she is the closest person to Debbie on earth, excluding perhaps the immediate family. Debbie and Mrs Brown do not share the usual intimacies, they have no common chatter about other people, but they have a kind of rock-bottom knowledge of each other’s fears and pains, or so Debbie thinks, knowing, nevertheless, that Mrs Brown knows more about her than she will ever know about Mrs Brown, since it is in Debbie’s house that the relationship is carried out. Mrs Brown washes Debbie’s underwear and tidies Debbie’s desk, putting Debbie’s letters, private and official, threatening and secret, in tidy heaps. Mrs Brown counts the bottles and sweeps up the broken glass after parties, though she does not partake of the festive food. Mrs Brown changes Debbie ‘s sheets.

Debbie did not ask Mrs Brown at that decisive interview whether Mrs Brown had children, though she was dying to, because she, Debbie, so resents being asked, by those interviewing her for jobs, whether she has children, what she would do with them. She did ask if Mrs Brown had a telephone, and Mrs Brown said yes, she did, she found it essential, she used the word ‘essential’ tidily and drily, just like that, without elaboration. ‘So you will tell me in advance, if at all possible,’ says Debbie, trying to sound sweet and commonly courteous, ‘if you can’t come ever, if you aren’t going to be able to come ever, because I have to make such complicated arrangements if people are going to let me down, that is, can’t make it for any reason.’ ‘I think you’ll find I’m reliable,’ says Mrs Brown. ‘But it’s no good me saying so, you’ll have to see. You needn’t worry though, bar the unforeseen.’ ‘Acts of God,’ says Debbie. ‘Well, and acts of Hooker too,’ says Mrs Brown, without saying who Hooker might be.

Debbie did find that Mrs Brown was, as she had said, reliable. She also discovered, not immediately, that Mrs Brown had two sons, Lawrence and Gareth, shortened to Gary by his friends but not by Mrs Brown. These boys were already ten and eight when Mrs Brown came to Debbie. Lawrence is now at Newcastle University—’the lodgings are cheaper up there’ says Mrs Brown. Gareth has left home without many qualifications and works, Mrs Brown says, ‘in distribution’. He has made the wrong sort of friends, Mrs Brown says, but does not elaborate. Hooker is the father of Lawrence and Gareth. Debbie does not know, and does not ask, whether Hooker is or is not Mr Brown. During the early childhood of Natasha and Jamie, Hooker would make sudden forays into Mrs Brown’s life and council flat, from which he had departed before she took to going out to clean up after people like Debbie. One of Mrs Brown’s rare days off was her court appearance to get an injunction to stop Hooker coming round. Hooker was the cause of Mrs Brown’s bruises, the chocolate and violet stains on the gold skin, the bloody cushions in the hair and the wine-coloured efflorescence on her lips. Once, and once only, at this time, Debbie found Mrs Brown sitting on the bathroom stool, howling, and brought her cups of coffee, and held her hands, and sent her home in a taxi. It was Mrs Brown who saw Debbie through the depression after the birth of Jamie, with a mixture of carefully timed indulgences and requirements. ‘I’ve brought you a bowl of soup, you’ll do no good in the world if you don’t eat.’ ‘I’ve brought Baby up to you, Mrs Dennison, he’s crying his heart out with hunger, he needs his mother, that’s what it is.’ They call each other Mrs Dennison and Mrs Brown. They rely on the kind of distance and breathing space this courtesy gives them. Mrs Brown was scathing about the days in hospital, when she was concussed, after one of Hooker’s visits. ‘They call you love, and dearie, and pet. I say, I need a bit of respect, my name is Mrs Brown.’

Debbie types ‘new moulding techniques give new streamlined shapes to the most banal objects. Sink trays and storage jars …’ Banal is the wrong word, she thinks. Everyday? Wrong too. The Hoover snorts on the turning of the stair. The doorbell rings. A voice of pure male rage rings out from the top floor.

‘Debbie. Debbie, are you there? Just come here a moment.’

Debbie is torn. Mrs Brown abandons the Hoover and all its slack, defunct-seeming tubes, along the banisters.

‘You attend to him, and I’ll just let the doctor in and say you’ll be down directly.’

Debbie negotiates the Hoover and goes up the attic stairs.

‘Look,’ says Debbie’s husband, Robin. ‘Look what she has done. If you can’t get it into her head that she mustn’t muck about with my work-things she’ll have to go.’

Robin has the whole third floor, once three bedrooms, a tiny room with a sink and a lavatory, as his studio. He has large pivoting windows set into the roof, with linen blinds, a natural cream, a terracotta. He can have almost whatever light he likes from whatever angle. Debbie feels her usual knot of emotions, fear that Robin will shout at Mrs Brown, fear that Mrs Brown will take offence, rage and grim gratitude mixed that it is always to her that he addresses his complaints.

‘The doctor has come for Jamie, darling,’ Debbie says. ‘I must go, he won’t have long.’

‘This bowl,’ says Robin Dennison, ‘this bowl, as anyone can see, is a work of art. Look at that glaze. Look at those huge satisfactory blue and orange fruits in it, look at the green leaves and the bits of yellow, just look, Debbie. Now I ask you, would anyone suppose this bowl was a kind of dustbin for things they were too lazy to put away or carry off, would they, do you suppose, anyone with their wits about them, would they?’

‘What’s the matter?’ says Debbie neutrally, her ear turned to the stairs.

‘Look, ‘cries Robin. The bowl, both sumptuously decorated and dusty, contains a few random elastic bands, a chain of paperclips, an obscure plastic cog from some tiny clock, a battered but unused stamp, two oil pastels, blue and orange, a piece of dried bread, a very short length of electric wire, a dead chrysanthemum, three coloured thumbtacks (red, blue, green), a single lapis cufflink, an electric bulb with a burnt patch on its curve, a box of matches, a china keyhole cover, two indiarubbers, a dead bluebottle and two live ants, running in circles, possibly busy, possibly frantically lost.

‘Her habits are filthy,’ says Robin.

Debbie looks around the studio, which is not the habitation of a tidy man. Apart from the inevitable mess, splashed palettes, drying canvases, jars of water, there are other heaps and dumps. Magazines, opened and closed, wineglasses, beer glasses, bottles, constellations of crayons and pencils, unopened messages from the Income Tax, saucers of clips and pins.

‘It is hard for anyone to tell what to leave alone, up here, and what to clear up.’

‘No, it isn’t. Dirt is dirt, and personal things, things in use, are things in use. All it requires is intelligence.’

‘She seems to have found that cufflink you were going on about.’

‘I expect I found it myself, and put it down somewhere safe, and she interfered with it.’

All this is part of a ritual dialogue which Debbie can hardly bear to hear again, let alone to utter her own banal parts of it, and yet she senses it is somehow necessary to their survival. She does not wholly know whether it is necessary because Robin needs to assert himself and win, or because if she does not stand between Robin and Mrs Brown Mrs Brown will leave. She does not need to think about it any more; she turns and hearkens to it, like Donne’s other compass half, like a heliotrope.

‘She could see I was painting exactly that dish.’

Indeed, there are sketches in charcoal, in coloured chalks, of exactly that dish, on an expanse of grained wood, propped up around the studio.

It crosses Debbie’s mind that Mrs Brown used exactly that dish as a picking-up receptacle for exactly that reason. Mrs Brown has her own modes of silent aggression. She does not raise this idea. Robin is neither moved by nor interested in Mrs Brown’s feelings.

‘Shall I take them all and throw them away in the bin in my study, darling? And dust your bowl for you?’

‘Wait a minute. Those are quite all right rubber bands. I was using that bread for rubbing out. The matches are OK, nothing wrong with them. Some of us can’t afford to throw good tools away, you know.’

‘Where shall I put them?’

‘Just stick them on the table over there. I’ll see to them myself. Dust the bowl, please.’

Debbie does as he asks, abstracting the cufflink, which she will return to his dressing-table. She looks at her husband, who glares back at her, and then gives a smile, like a rueful boy. He is a long, thin, unsubstantial man in jeans and a fisherman’s smock, with big joints, knuckles and wrists and ankles, like an adolescent, which he is not. He has a very English face, long and fine and pink and white, like a worried colt. His soft hair is pushed up all round his head like a hedgehog and is more or less the same colour as one. His eyes are an intense blue, like speedwells. A photographer could choose between making him look like a gentle mystic and making him look like a dedicated cricketer. A painter could choose between a haziness at the edges, always light, never heavy, and very clear sketched-in features, bones, a brow, a chin, a clearcut nose, in a kind of pale space.

‘You have managed to make her understand about the fetishes.’

‘It took long enough,’ he grumbles. ‘I even gave her lectures on tones and complementary colours, I just stood there with the things and showed her.’

‘I should think that was interesting for her.’

‘She should know her job, without all that fuss. Anyway, it worked, I grant you that it worked.’

‘I must go, darling, the doctor’s here. Do you want coffee when he’s gone, shall I bring you a mug?’

‘Yes please. That will be nice.’

He is not apologising, but the ritual confrontation is over. Debbie kisses him. His cheek is soft. She says,

‘Have you heard from that girl from the Callisto Gallery, yet?’

‘I don’t think she’ll come. I don’t think she ever meant to come.’

‘Yes, she did,’ said Debbie. ‘I talked to her, too. She really liked that blue and yellow plate picture Toby has got in his loo. She said she didn’t think much of Toby’s taste in general, but that was exquisite, she said, she said she just sat there staring at it and caused an awful queue!’

‘She was probably drunk.’

‘Don’t be silly, Robin. She’ll turn up, I know. I don’t say things I don’t mean, do I?’

Debbie doesn’t know whether the girl, Shona McRury, will turn up or not, but she says she will, with force, because it is better for her, as well as for Robin, if he is in a hopeful mood. Deborah loves Robin. She has loved him since they met at Art School, where she studied Graphic Design and he studied Fine Art. She wanted to be a wood-engraver and illustrate children’s books. What she loved about Robin was the quality of his total dedication to his work, which had a certain austere separateness from everyone else’s work. Those were the days of the sixties, in fact the early seventies, when much painting was abstract, washes of colour and no colour, geometric patterns, games with the nature of canvas and pigment and the colours of light and their effect on the eye. Robin was a neo-realist before neo-realism. He painted what he saw, metal surfaces, wooden surfaces, plaster surfaces, with hallucinatory skill and accuracy.

He painted expanses of neutral colours—wooden planks, glass table-tops, beige linen, crumbling plaster, and somewhere, somewhere unexpected, not quite in a corner, not quite in the centre, not where the folds were pulling from or the planks ran, he painted something very small and very brilliant, a glass ball, a lustre vase, a bouquet of bone china flowers (never anything alive), a heap of feathers. It was just this side of kitsch, then and now. It could have been turned into sweet prints and sold in folders in gift shops, then, for its wit, now for its nostalgic emptiness containing verisimilitude. But Debbie saw that it was a serious attempt at a serious and terrible problem, an attempt to answer the question every artist must ask him or herself, at some time, why bother, why make representations of anything at all?

She said to him, seeing her first two of the series, a hexagonal Chinese yellow box on a grey blanket, a paperweight on a kitchen table, ‘They are miraculous, they are like those times when time seems to stop, and you just look at something, and see it, out of time, and you feel surprised that you can see at all, you are so surprised, and the seeing goes on and on, and gets better and better…’

‘Is that what you see in them?’ he said.

Oh yes. Isn’t that what you meant?’

‘It is exactly what I meant. But nobody’s ever seen it. Or nobody’s ever said it, anyway.’

‘I expect they do, really’

‘Sometimes I think, it just looks—ordinary—to other people. Unprivileged things, you know.’

‘How could it?’ said Debbie.

Sex makes everything shine, even if it is not privileged, and Debbie made Robin happy and their happiness made his pictures seem stranger and brighter, perhaps even made them, absolutely, stranger and brighter. When they got married, Robin had a few hours part-time teaching in a college, and Debbie, whose degree gave her more marketable skills, got a job doing layout in a corset-trade magazine, and then a subordinate job in A Woman’s Place, and then promotion. She was good, she was well-paid, she was the breadwinner. It seemed silly for Robin to go on teaching at all, his contribution was so meagre. Debbie’s head was full of snazzy swimsuits and orange vats of carrot soup with emerald parsley sprinkled in it, with lipsticks from grape and plum to poppy and rose, with eyegloss and blusher and the ghosts of unmade woodcuts. Her fingers remembered the slow, careful work in the wood, with a quiet grief, that didn’t diminish, but was manageable. She hated Robin because he never once mentioned the unmade wood-engravings. It is possible to feel love and hate quite quietly, side by side, if one is a self-contained person. Debbie continued to love Robin, whilst hating him because of the woodcuts, because of the extent of his absence of interest in how she managed the house, the children, the money, her profession, his needs and wants, and because of his resolute attempts to unsettle, humiliate, or drive away Mrs Brown, without whom all Debbie ‘s balancing acts would clatter and fall in wounding disarray.

Left to himself, Robin Dennison walks agitated up and down his studio. He is over forty. He thinks, I am over forty. He prevents himself, all the time now, from seeing his enterprise, his work, his life, as absurd. He is not suited to the artistic life, in most ways. By upbringing and temperament, he should have been a solicitor or an accountant, he should have worn a suit and fished for trout and played cricket. He has no great self-confidence, no braggadocio, no real or absolute disposition to the sort of self-centred isolation he practises. He does it out of a stubborn faithfulness to a vision he had, a long time ago now, a vision which has never expanded or diminished or taken its teeth out of him. He was given a set of gouache paints by an aunt when he was a boy, and painted a geranium, and then a fish-tank. He can still remember the illicit, it seemed to him, burst out of sensuous delight with which he saw the wet carmine trail of his first flick of the brush, the slow circling of the wet hairs in a cobalt pool, the dashes of yellow ochre and orange, as he conjured up, on matt white, wet and sinuous fish-tails and fins. He was not much good at anything else, which muted any familial conflict over his choice of future. With his brushes in his hand he could see, he told himself, through art school. Without them, he was grey fog in a world of grey fog. He painted small bright things in large expanses of grey and buff and beige. Everyone said, ‘He’s got something,’ or more dubiously, ‘He’s got something.’ Probably not enough, they qualified this, silently to themselves, but Robin heard them well enough, for all that.

He could talk to Debbie. Debbie knew about his vision of colour, he had told her, and she had listened. He talked to her agitatedly at night about Matisse, about the paradoxical way in which the pure sensuousness of Luxe, calme et volupté could be a religious experience of the nature of things. Not softness, he said to Debbie, power, calm power.

Debbie said yes, she understood, and they went to the South of France for a holiday, to be in the strong light, la-bas. This was a disaster. He tried putting great washes of strong colour on the canvas, â la Matisse, â la Van Gogh, and it came out watery and feeble and absurd, there was nothing he could do. His only successful picture of that time was a kind of red beetle or bug and a large shining green-black scarab and a sulphurous butterfly on a seat of pebbles, grey and pinkish and sandy and buff and white and terracotta, you can imagine the kind of thing, it is everywhere in all countries, a variegated expanse of muted pebbles. Extending to all the four corners of the world of the canvas, a stony desert, with a dead leaf or two, and some random straws, and the baleful insects. He sold that one to a gallery and had hopes, but heard no more, his career did not take off, and they never went back to the strong light, they take their holidays in the Cotswolds.

Robin has ritualised his life dangerously, but this is not, as he thinks it is, entirely because of his precarious vocation. His father, a Borough Surveyor, behaved in much the same way, particularly with regard to his distinction between his own untouchable ‘things’ and other people’s, especially the cleaning-lady’s ‘filth’. Mr Dennison, Mr Rodney Dennison, used to shout at and about the ‘charwoman’ if pipe-dottle was thrown away, or soap-fragments amalgamated, or scattered bills tidily gathered. He, like Robin with Mrs Brown, used to feel a kind of panic of constriction, like the pain of sinus-fluid thickening in the skull-pockets, when threatened by tidy touches. He, like Robin, used to see Mrs Briggs’s progress like a snail-trail across his private spaces. Robin puts it all down to Art. He does not ask himself if his hatred of Mrs Brown is a deflected resentment of his helplessness in the capable hands of his wife, breadwinner and life-manager. He knows it is not so: Debbie is beautiful and clean and represents order. Mrs Brown is chaotic and wild to look at and a secret smoker and represents—even while dispersing or re-distributing it—‘filth’.

Mrs Brown has always had an awkward habit of presuming to give the family gifts. She possesses a knitting-machine, which Hooker got off the back of a lorry, and she is also good with knitting needles, crochet-hooks, embroidery silks and tapestry (not often, these two last, they are too expensive). She makes all her own clothes, out of whatever comes to hand, old plush curtains, Arab blankets, parachute silk, his own discarded trousers. She makes them flamboyantly, with patches and fringes and braid and bizarre buttons. The epitome of tat, Robin considers, and he has to consider, for she always strikes the eye, in a magenta and vermilion overall over salmon-pink crepe pantaloons, in a lime-green shift with black lacy inserts. This would not be so bad, if she didn’t make, hadn’t made for years, awful jumpers for Natasha and Jamie, awful rainbow jumpers in screaming hues, candy-striped jumpers, jumpers with bobble-cherries bouncing on them, long peculiar rainbow scarves in fluffy angora, all sickly ice-cream colours. Robin tells Debbie these things must be sent back at once, his children can’t be seen dead in them. The children are ambivalent, depending on age and circumstances. Jamie wore out one jumper with red engines and blue cows when he was six and would not be parted from it. Natasha in her early teens had an unexpected success at a disco in a kind of dayglo fringed bolero (acid yellow, salmon pink, swimming-pool blue) but has rejected other offerings with her father’s fastidious distaste. The real sufferer is Debbie, whose imagination is torn all ways. She knows from her own childhood exactly how it feels to wear clothes one doesn’t like, isn’t comfortable and invisible in, is embarrassed by. She also believes very strongly that there is more true kindness and courtesy in accepting gifts gratefully and enthusiastically than in making them. And, more selfishly, she simply cannot do without Mrs Brown, she needs Mrs Brown, her breakfast table is ornamented with patchwork teacosies contributed by Mrs Brown, her study chairs have circular cushions knitted in sugar-pink and orange by Mrs Brown. Mrs Brown stands in Debbie’s study door sometimes and expounds her colour theory.

‘They always told us, didn’t they, the teachers and grans, orange and pink, they make you blink, blue and green should not be seen, mauve and red cannot be wed, but I say, they’re all there, the colours, God made ‘em all, and mixes ‘em all in His creatures, what exists goes together somehow or other, don’t you think, Mrs Dennison?’

‘Well, yes, but there are rules too, you know, Mrs Brown, how to get certain effects, there are rules, complementary colours and things

‘I’m learning all that. He tells me, when I move his things by accident, or whatever. Fascinating.’

Mrs Brown’s yellow face is long, unsmiling and judicious. She adds, ‘If Jamie’s got no use for that nice sky-blue tank-top I did for him I’ll have it back if you don’t mind, I’ve got a use for a bit of sky-blue.’

‘Oh, he loves it, Mrs Brown, it’s just a wee bit tight under the armpits, you understand …’

‘As I said, I’ve got a use for a bit of sky-blue.’

Implacably. Debbie feels terrible. Mrs Brown goes through Jamie’s drawers and points out that there are holes in his red sweat-shirt, that those rugger socks are shockingly shrunk, look at those tiddly feet. She puts them in a plastic dustbin bag. Debbie adds a cocktail dress she made a mistake about, mulberry shot silk, and two of Robin’s ties, presents from his auntie Nem, which he will never wear, because they are a horrible mustard colour with plummy flowers.

‘Interesting,’ says Mrs Brown, holding them up like captured eels, and adding them to her spoils. She is mollified, Debbie thinks, the mulberry dress has mollified her. She balks at knowing what Mrs Brown will do with the mulberry dress.

Robin Dennison’s ‘fetishes’ have a table of their own, a white-painted wooden table, very simple. Once they were mantelpiece ‘things’ but as they took on their status of ‘fetishes’ they were given this solidly unassuming English altar. What they have in common is a certain kind of glossy, very brightly coloured solidity. They are the small icons of a cult of colour. They began with the soldier, who cost 5/6 when Robin was little, and is made of painted wood, with red trousers and a blue jacket and a tall, bulbous, black wooden bearskin. His red is fading cherry-crimson, his blue is a fading colour between royal and ultramarine. He has a gold strap under his wooden chin and a pair of hectic pink circular spots on his wooden cheeks. Robin does not often paint him now—he cannot clear him of his double connotations of militarism and infantilism, and he loves him for neither of these, but because he was his first model for slivers of shine on rounded surfaces. Sometimes Robin paints his shadow into little crowds of the other things.

Some of the other things are pure representations of single colours. Of these, two are gloss—a cobalt-blue candlestick from the glassworks at Biot, and a round heavy grass-green, golden-green apple made by Wedgwood, greener and greener in its depths. The yellow thing was much the most expensive. It is not pure yellow as the candlestick is blue, and the apple is green, it is sunny-yellow, butter-yellow, buttercup-yellow with a blue rim, a reproduction sauceboat from Monet’s self-designed breakfast service for his house at Giverny. It cost £50 which Robin did not have, but spent, he wanted that yellow so much. He did not really want the sauce-boat, but anything else he wanted cost money which even in his madness he saw he didn’t have. Robin in his fit of educating Mrs Brown observes to her that the blue rim makes the yellow colour sing out because the colours are almost complementary. He would, however, still like to find a yellow thing without the blue. There is no orange thing either. Robin often stands an orange and a lemon amongst the things, to make the colours complete, and Mrs Brown’s habit of moving these, or even throwing them away when they begin to soften and darken and grow patches of sage-green, blue-specked mould, is one of the things that makes Robin see red and roar.

Purple is represented by a rather sweet hand-made china sculpture of a round bowl of violets. These are both pale mauve and deep purple; they have a few, not many, green leaves in a wishy-washy apple colour, and their container is a softly-glazed black. Sometimes Robin leaves the leaves out, when he doesn’t want that colour. He knows the fetishes so well, he can allow for the effect of the leaves on the violets. Sometimes he wishes the leaves weren’t there and sometimes he makes them fit into his colour-scheme with delicate shifts of tones and accommodations in other places. There was a problem with red for years and years. There was a banal red German plate, modern and utilitarian, a good strong red, that stood in, but could not make itself sing out or be loved. When Robin found the present red thing he felt very uneasy because he knew immediately it was the, or a, right thing, and at the same time he didn’t like it. He still doesn’t. Like the poor soldier, but in more sinister ways, it has too much meaning. He found it in a Chinese bric-a-brac shop, in a dump-bin with hundreds of others. It is a large red, heart-shaped pincushion, plumply and gleamingly covered in a poppy-red silk which is exactly what he wants, at once soft and shining, delicate and glossy. It had a vulgar white lace frill, like a choir-boy’s collar, which Robin took off. Sometimes he puts into it some of his grandmother’s old hatpins, imitation jewels, or lumps of jet. But he doesn’t quite like this, it borders on the surrealist, and though he senses that might be interesting, it also worries him. He did buy a box of multi-coloured glass-headed pins which he occasionally displays in a random scattering shape, or, once, a tight half-moon.

Besides the single-coloured things, there are a few, a very few, multi-coloured things. A 1950s Venetian glass tree, picked up in a second-hand shop, bearing little round fruits of many colours—emerald green, ruby and dark sapphire, amethyst and topaz. A pottery jug from Deruta with a huge triangular beak-like spout, covered with bright round-petalled childish flowers in all the colours, and a pair of chirpy primitive singing-birds, in brown. A pot, also from Deruta, with a tawny-gold and blue-crested grotesque merman, or human-headed dragon, bearded and breathing a comma-shaped cloud of russet fire. There is a kite on the wall, a Korean kite in puce and yellow and blue and green and scarlet, and there are two large Chinese silk pipe-cleaner birds, crested and flaunting long tails, one predominantly crimson, with a yellow and aquamarine crest, one blue and green. The birds, too, the most fragile things, are a point of contention between Robin and Mrs Brown. She says they collect dust. He says she bends their legs and squashes their down and interferes with the way they turn their necks to preen. She says, they don’t balance, the way he fixes them. Once she balanced one on the bough of the glass tree. There was a sulk that lasted weeks, and Mrs Brown talked of leaving.

It was after Debbie patched up this difference that Robin explained to Mrs Brown about red and green. He moved the apple back next to the pincushion, and redeployed the violets in front of the Monet sauceboat, beside the cobalt-blue candlestick, which was shaped a little like a gentian, a tall cup on a stem. Mrs Brown’s preference was for standing the fetishes in a rainbow line, from infra-red to ultra-violet, so to speak. Robin said,

‘Certain combinations have certain effects. For instance the opposition of yellow and violet, blue and orange, that can appear natural in a way, because natural shadows are blue or violet. Light and shade, you see? Whereas red and green, if you put them next to each other—sometimes you can see a kind of dancing yellow line where they meet—and this isn’t to do with light and shade, it’s to do, possibly, with the fact that if you add certain reds to certain greens you can make yellow, which you would never have guessed.’

‘Geraniums are natural,’ said Mrs Brown.

Robin stared at her abstractedly.

‘Natural red and green. They don’t make yellow.’

‘Look,’ said Robin, pushing together the soft heart and the hard apple. He could see the dance of unreal yellow. He was entranced.

‘Hmn,’ said Mrs Brown.

‘Can you see yellow?’

‘Well, a sort of, how shall I say, a sort of wriggling, a sort of shimmering. I see what you mean.’

‘I try to make that happen, in the paintings.’

‘So I see. It’s interesting, once I know what you’re up to.’

The sentence was a concession, unsmiling, not wholly gracious. She accepted that he had given her what he could, the battle was, she obviously considered, won, and by her. Robin was relieved, really. He was not so far out of touch with real life that he could not sense Debbie’s fear of losing Mrs Brown. So he had given Mrs Brown his secret vision of the yellow line. Mrs Brown went out, head high. She was wearing a kind of orange and green camouflage Afro-wrapper, and a pink headband.

Shona McRury telephones. She asks to speak to Debbie, who has in fact answered the phone, and spends a long time congratulating Debbie on an article on feminist art in A Woman’s Place, an article about the amorphous things that women make that do not claim the ‘authority’ of ‘art-works’, the undignified things women ‘frame’ that male artists have never noticed, tampons and nappies but not only those, and the painted interior cavities of women, not the soft fleshy desirable superficies explored/exploited by men. Debbie has made a lovely centre-spread of the crayon drawings of an artist called Brenda Murphy, who works in the kitchen with her children, using their materials, crayons and felt-tips on paper, creating works that are a savage and loving commentary on their lives together. Shona asks Debbie if she knows if Ms Murphy has an agent or a gallery, and Debbie answers abstractedly, praises the interesting variety, the eclectic brilliance of Callisto’s shows, and is rewarded by Shona McRury’s request to see Debbie’s husband’s work, which is so witty, she thinks, she just loves that mysteriously funny little painting in Toby’s loo, a jewel in a desert. Debbie thinks a jewel in a desert is a good phrase, but is not sure the idea of wit bodes well. Robin is, she recognises, somewhat humourless in his driven state. But she fixes something exact, for this coming Wednesday, without consulting Robin. Robin is perturbed and threatened by the closeness of Wednesday, as Debbie has foreseen. She becomes ever so slightly minatory, and at the same time plaintive. ‘It isn’t so easy to get a chance of getting the work seen by a gallery, you can’t just pick and choose your moments or you end up with none, as you ought to know by now, and I’ve done my best for you, I pinned her down, you have to, she’s so busy, even with the best will in the world …’

Robin condescends, in terror, to have his work viewed.

Shona McRury has topaz eyes and long, silky brown hair, like a huge ribbon, caught up at the back with a tortoiseshell comb. She wears topaz ear-rings, little spheres on gold chains, that exactly match her eyes, and an olive silk suit, with a loose jacket and a pleated skirt, over a lemon-yellow silk shirt, all of which tone in impeccably with her eyes. (Debbie who is now a professional in these matters sees immediately how the whole delicate and powerful effect is constructed around the eyes, reinforced by a subtle powdering of olive and gold shadow shot with a sharper green, almost malachite.) She climbs up to Robin’s attic on dark-green lizard-skin shoes. Between the lizard skin and the olive silk are slightly golden metallic stockings on legs not quite beautiful, too thin, too straight. Robin goes first, then Shona McRury, then Debbie, then Mrs Brown, with a bottle of chilled Sauvignon and three glasses on a Japanese lacquer tray. Mrs Brown is wearing her bird-of-paradise upholstery trousers and a patchwork shirt in rainbow colours, stitched together with red feather-stitching. Although she has not brought herself a glass, she positions herself inside the studio door for the showing, and makes no attempt to go away, staring with sombre interest at Shona McRury’s elegance and Robin’s canvases.

Debbie has not decided whether to leave Robin alone with Shona McRury, or to stay and put in a word here and there. Mrs Brown’s odd behaviour decides her, and is perhaps altogether too decisive. It is not in Debbie ‘s power to say anything like, ‘You may go now, Mrs Brown,’ but she can say to her, ‘Come on, let’s leave them to it,’ so she does, and she and Mrs Brown go downstairs together.

Shona McRury prowls in Robin’s studio in her topaz ear-rings and lizard shoes. She rearranges the fetishes absentmindedly, rattling the Monet dish in its saucer. Robin puts up a series of paintings of the fetishes on different backgrounds, in different numbers, in different lights. White silk like a glacier, crumpled newspaper, dark boards, pale boards. Her mouth is large and soft and brown. She lights a cigarette. She says, ‘I like that,’ and ‘I like that,’ and nothing else for a bit, and then begins to read the paintings as allegories. ‘They’re modern vanitases, I see,’ says Shona McRury, ‘they’re about the littleness of our life.’ Robin tries to keep quiet. He cannot overbear her as if she were Mrs Brown, he cannot tell her that they are not about littleness but about the infinite terror of the brilliance of colour, of which he could almost die, he doesn’t think those things in words anyway. He does at first say things like, ‘Hmn, well, this one is solving a different kind of problem, d’you see?’ and then he doesn’t say anything because he can see she doesn’t see, she isn’t the slightest bit interested in the fact that the pictures, of which there are a very large number, never repeat, though they are all in a sense the same, they never set themselves exactly the same problem. She doesn’t see that. She says, ‘It’s a bit frightening, a bit depressing, all that empty space, isn’t it, it reminds you of coffins and bare kitchen tables with no food, no sustenance, all those bare boards, don’t they?’

‘I don’t think of it that way,’ says Robin.

‘How do you think of it?’

‘Well, as a series of problems, really, inexhaustible problems, of light and colour, you know.’

He does not say, because he does not articulate, the sense he has that he is allowed his patch of brilliance because he has dutifully and accurately and even beautifully painted all these null and neutral tones, the doves, the dusts, the dead leaves.

‘Do you have any inkling of a change of direction, a next phase coming up, you know, a new focus of interest, anything like that?’

‘I think if I had a big show—if it were all on show together, all the different—hm—aspects—hm—solutions, so to speak, temporary solutions—I might want to—move on to something else. It’s hard to imagine, really.’

‘Is it?’

He does not see how crucial this little question is. Oh yes. One thing at a time. I seem to have my work cut out, cut out, you know, for me, as it were, yes.’

Shona McRury says, ‘All those prints of lonely deckchairs in little winds, in gardens and on beaches. When you see the first, you think, how moving, how interesting. And when you see the tenth, or the twentieth, you think, oh, another solitary deckchair with a bit of wind in it, what else is there? You know?’

‘I think so.’

‘I can see your work isn’t like that.’

‘Oh no. Not at all like that.’

‘But it might look like that. To the uneducated eye.’

‘Might it?’

‘It might.’

Debbie watches Shona McRury walk away down Alma Road. How beautifully her olive skirt sits on her thin haunches, how perfectly, how expensively, those pleats are coerced to caress. Robin says his talk with her went well, but Debbie thinks nothing of Robin’s judgement, and he does not seem seized with hope or vigour. Shona McRury’s long straight band of hair flaps and sidles. Mrs Brown, in her trench-coat, catches up with Shona McRury. Mrs Brown’s hair stands up like a wiry plant in a pot, inside a coil of plaited scarves, orange and lime. Mrs Brown says something to Shona McRury who varies her pace, turns her head, strokes her head, answers. Mrs Brown says something else. What can Mrs Brown have to say to Shona McRury? Debbie’s mind fantastically meditates treason, subversion, sabotage. But Mrs Brown has always been so good, so patient, despite her disdainful look, to which she has a right. Mrs Brown could not want to hurt Robin? Mrs Brown is in no position to hurt Robin, surely, if she did. Why should Shona McRury listen, more than out of politeness, to anything Mrs Brown has to say? They turn the corner. Debbie feels tears bursting, somewhere inside the flesh of her cheeks, in the ducts round her nose and eyes. She hears Robin’s voice on the stairs, saying it is just like that woman to go home without removing the wineglasses or wiping up the rings on his desk and drawing table.

Shona McRury sends a gallery postcard to Robin and Debbie jointly, saying that she really loved seeing the pictures, which have real integrity, and that things are very crowded and confused in the life of her gallery just now. Debbie knows that this means no, and suspects that the kindnesses are for her, Debbie ‘s, possible future usefulness, that is, A Woman’s Places possible future usefulness, to the Callisto Gallery. She does not say that to Robin, whom she is beginning to treat like a backward and stupid child, which worries her, since that is not what he is. And when A Woman’s Place sends her off a month or two later to the Callisto Gallery with a photographer, a nice-enough on-the-make Liverpudlian called Tom Sprot, to illustrate an article on a new feminist installation, she goes in a friendly enough mood. She is a reasonable woman, she could not have expected more from Shona McRury, and knows it.

Tom Sprot has brilliantined blond hair and baggy tartan trousers. He is very laid-back, very calm. When he gets inside the gallery, which is normally creamy and airy, he says, ‘Wow!’ and starts rushing about, peering through his lens, with alacrity. The whole space has been transformed into a kind of soft, even squashy, brilliantly coloured Aladdin’s Cave. The walls are hung with what seem like huge tapestries, partly knitted, partly made like rag rugs, with shifting streams and islands of colour, which when looked at closely reveal little peering mad embroidered faces, green with blue eyes, black with red eyes, pink with silver eyes. Swaying crocheted cobwebs hang from the ceiling, inhabited by dusky spiders and swarms of sequined blue flies with gauzy wings. These things are brilliantly pretty, but not like a stage set, they are elegant and sinister, there is something horrid about the netted pockets with the heaped blue bodies. The spiders themselves are menaced by phalanxes of feather dusters, all kinds of feathers, a peacock fan, a fluffy nylon cyan-blue and shocking-pink tube, a lime-green and orange palm tree on a golden staff, wound with lame. The cavern has a crazy kind of resemblance to a lived-in room. Chests of drawers, made of orange boxes covered with patchworks of wallpaper, from vulgar silver roses to William Morris birds, from Regency plum stripes to Laura Ashley pink sprigs, reveal half-open treasure chests with mazy compartments containing crazy collections of things. White bone buttons. Glass stoppers. Chicken bones. Cufflinks, all single. Medicine bottles with lacquered labels, full of iridescent beads and codliver-oil capsules. Pearlised plastic poppet beads and sunflower seeds, dolls’ teaspoons and drifts of variegated tealeaves and dead rose-petals. Sugar mice, some half-chewed. String, bright green, waxed red, hairy brown, running from compartment to compartment.

There are pieces of furniture, or creatures, standing about in all this. A large tump, or possibly a giant pouffe, layered in skirts of scarlet and orange, grass-green and emerald, dazzlingly juxtaposed, reveals, if the wools are parted, a circle of twenty or thirty little knitted pink breasts, and above that another of little chocolate-coloured satin ones, a kind of squat Diana of Ephesus without face or hands. A long bolster-like creature might be a thin woman or a kind of lizard or even a piece of the seashore. It is mostly knitted, in rich browns and greens, with scalloped fronds and trailing, weedy ‘limbs’ or maybe tentacles—there are more, when it has been walked round, than four. From a distance it has a pleasing look of rock-pools crusted with limpets and anemones. Closer, it can be seen to be plated with a kind of armour of crocheted bosses, violet and saffron, some tufted with crimson, or trailing threads of blood-coloured embroidery-silks.

The centrepiece is a kind of dragon and chained lady, St George and the Princess Saba. Perseus and Andromeda. The dragon has a cubic blue body and a long concertina neck. It has a crest of mulberry taffeta plates, blanket-stitched, something like the horrent scallops of the Stegosaurus. It is an odd dragon, recumbent amongst its own coils, a dragon related to a millipede, with hundreds of black shining wiry tentacular legs, which expose their scarlet linings and metal filaments. It is knitted yet solid, it raises a square jaw with a woollen beard and some teeth dripping with matted hair and broken hairpins, multicoloured fluffy foam and cotton spittie. Its eyes are bland blue rounds with soft chenille lashes. It is a Hoover and a dragon, inert and suffocating.

And the lady is flesh-coloured and twisted, her body is broken and concertinaed, she is draped flat on a large stone, her long limbs are pink nylon, her chains are twisted brassieres and demented petticoats, pyjama cords and sinister strained tights. She has a cubist aspect, crossed with Diana of Ephesus again, her breasts are a string of detached and battered shoulder-pads, three above two, her pubic hair is shrunk angora bonnet. Her face is embroidered on petit-point canvas on a round embroidery-frame, it is half-done, a Botticelli Venus with a chalk outline, a few blonde tresses, cut-out eyeholes, stitched round with spiky black lashes. At first you think that the male figure is totally absent, and then you see him, them, minuscule in the crannies of the rock, a plastic knight on a horse, once silver, now mud-green, a toy soldier with a broken sword and a battered helmet, who have both obviously been through the wheel of the washing-machine, more than once.

There is someone in the window hanging a series of letters, gold on rich chocolate, on a kind of hi-tech washing-line with tiny crimson pegs. It says,

Underneath the line of letters a photograph goes up. Debbie goes out into the street to look at it, a photograph of Mrs Brown under a kind of wild crown of woven scarves, with her old carved look and an added look of sly amusement, in the corners of mouth and eyes. Her skin has come out duskier than it ‘really’ is, her bones are sculpted, she resembles a cross between the Mona Lisa and a Benin bronze.

As far as Debbie knows, Mrs Brown is at this moment hoovering her stairs. She cannot think. She thinks several things at once. She thinks with pure delight of the unexpectedness and splendour of Sheba, for Mrs Brown. She thinks inconsequentially of a ball she once went to, a Chelsea Arts Ball, in the mulberry-coloured dress which is now the dragon-scales. She thinks, with a terrible flutter of unreadiness to think about this, that Mrs Brown will now for certain leave. She wonders why Mrs Brown said nothing—was it a desire to shock, or a simpler desire to startle, or the courtesy of the old Mrs Brown, aware that Debbie could not do without her, thinking how to break the news, or was she—she certainly is in part—simply secretive and cautious? She thinks with terrible protectiveness of Robin in his attic, explaining his fetishes to Mrs Brown, and roaring as he will roar no more, about her forays into his workplace. She does not feel for a moment that Mrs Brown has ‘stolen’ Robin’s exhibition, but she has a miserable fear that Robin may think that.

And she feels something else, looking at Sheba Brown’s apparently inexhaustible and profligate energy of colourful invention. She feels a kind of subdued envy which carries with it an invigorating sting. She thinks of the feel of the wooden blocks she used to cut.

Tom Sprot comes up, full of excitement. He has discovered a chest of drawers full of tangled thread and smaller chests of drawers all full of tangled thread and smaller still chests of drawers. He has got the text of an interview done by an art critic for A Woman’s Place, the text of which has just been delivered hot to the gallery by a messenger on a motorbike.

Debbie skims through it.

Sheba Brown lives in a council flat, surrounded by her own work, wall-hangings and cushions. She is in her forties, of part-Guyanese, part-Irish ancestry, and has had a hard life. Her work is full of feminist comments on the trivia of our daily life, on the boredom of the quotidian, but she has no sour reflections, no chip on her shoulder, she simply makes everything absurd and surprisingly beautiful with an excess of inventive wit. Some of her hangings resemble the work of Richard Dadd, with their intricate woven backgrounds, though they obviously owe something also to the luxurious innovations of Kaffe Fasset. But Sheba Brown, unlike Richard Dadd, is not mad or obsessed; she is richly sane and her conversation is good-humoured and funny.

She has brought up two sons, and gathered the materials for her work on a mixture of Social Security and her meagre earnings as a cleaner. She gets her materials from everywhere—skips, jumble sales, cast-offs, going through other people ‘s rubbish, clearing up after school fetes. She says she began on her ‘soft sculpture’ by accident really—she had an ‘urge to construct’ but had to make things that could be packed away into small spaces at night. Her two most prized possessions are a knitting-machine and a lockup room in the basement of her block of flats which she has by arrangement with the caretaker. Once I had the room, I could make boxlike things as well as squashy ones,’ she says, smiling with satisfaction.

She says she owes a great deal to one family for whom she has worked, an ‘artistic family’ who taught her about colours (not that she needed ‘teaching’—her instinct for new shocking effects and juxtapositions is staggering) and broadened her ideas of what a work of art might be …

Debbie goes home thoughtful. Mrs Brown has done her day’s work and left. Robin is fretful. He does not want spaghetti for supper, he is sick of pasta, he thinks they must have had pasta every night for a fortnight. Debbie considers him, as he sits twisting his fettucine with a fork, and thinks that on the whole it is probably safe to tell him nothing about Mrs Brown and her Aladdin’s Cave, since he never takes an interest in A Woman’s Place, she can hide that from him, and she can probably keep other criticism from him too, he doesn’t read much, it depresses him.

No sooner has she worked all this out than it is all ruined by Jamie, who rushes into the kitchen crying, come and see, come and see, Mrs Brown is on the telly. When neither of his parents moves he cries louder,

‘She’s got an exhibition of things like Muppets with that gallery-lady who came here, do come and look, Daddy, they’re bizarre.’

So Robin goes and looks. Sheba Brown looks down her long nose at him out of the screen and says,

‘Well, it all just comes to me in a kind of coloured rush, I just like putting things together, there’s so much in the world, isn’t there, and making things is a natural enough way of showing your excitement

The screen briefly displays the Hoover-dragon and the washing-bound lady.

‘No, no, I don’t do it out of resentment,’ says Sheba Brown enthusiastically in voice-over, as the camera pursues the strangling twisted tights. ‘No, I find it all interesting, I told you. Working as a cleaning-lady, OK, you learn a lot, it’s honest, you can see things anywhere at all to make things up from, that’s one thing I know. People are funny really, you can’t be a cleaning-lady for long without learning that

Debbie looks at Robin. Robin looks at Sheba Brown. Sheba Brown vanishes and is replaced by a jolly avuncular Tar surrounded by simpering infants, brandishing a plateful of steaming rectangular Fishy Morsels. Robin says,

‘That, round that woman-sort-of-thing’s neck, that was that school tie I lost.’

‘You didn’t lose it. You threw it out.’

‘No, I didn’t. How would I have done that? I might go back to some school reunion, might I not, you never know, and it isn’t likely I shall go and waste any money on another hideous purple tie, is it?’

‘It was in the waste-paper basket. I said she could have it.’

‘Mummy,’ says Jamie, ‘can we go and see Mrs Brown’s squashy sculptures?’

‘We will all go,’ says Robin. ‘Courtesy requires that we all go. And see what else she has filched.’

Mrs Brown comes in the next day accompanied by a grey-haired sylph in ballet tights and trainers.

‘Mrs Brown, Mrs Brown,’ says Jamie (it is the school holidays), ‘Mrs Brown, we saw you on the telly. And your name is beautiful, and I think the Muppet sort of things and the little faces are stupiferous.’

Mrs Brown says,

‘It looks as though I can’t come for a bit, Mrs Dennison. I hadn’t quite taken what a change in my life it was going to make, showing anyone my things. I just suddenly got it into my head that it was time they were seen by someone, you know how it is, and things got taken on from there, out of my control rather, though I’m not complaining. I kept meaning to say something, but it didn’t seem to be the moment, and I was concerned for you, how you would take it, for you do need someone to rely on, as we both know. Now this here is Mrs Stimpson, who will do exactly what I did, I’ll show her all the ropes, and how not to interfere with Mr Dennison, and I really do think you’ll hardly notice, Mrs Dennison. It’ll be just the same.’

Debbie stares silently at Mrs Brown. Mrs Brown drops her eyes and then looks up slightly flushed.

‘You do see how it was?’ she asks, steadily enough. Debbie thinks, the worst thing is, if we had been friends, she would have shown me her things. But we weren’t. I only thought we were.

Sheba Brown says, ‘We understood each other, Mrs Dennison. But no one’s unique. Mrs Stimpson is quite reliable and resourceful. I wouldn’t let you down by bringing anyone who wasn’t. She’ll be just like me.’

Debbie says, ‘And does Mrs Stimpson make secret works of art?’

‘Now that,’ says Sheba Brown, ‘you will have to find out for yourself.’

Mrs Stimpson’s young-old face has a firm, knowing little smile on it. She says,

‘We can but try, Mrs Dennison. Without prejudice.’

‘I suppose so,’ says Debbie. Before she can open her mouth again Mrs Brown and Mrs Stimpson have gone into the kitchen. Debbie hears the coffee-grinder. They will bring her a cup of coffee. It will all be more or less the same.

Or not quite the same. For one thing, Debbie goes back to making wood-engravings. A Book of Bad Fairies and A Book of Good Fairies, which have a certain success in the world of book illustration. Some of the more exotic fairies have the carved, haughty face of Sheba Brown, and the sweet, timeless face of Mrs Stimpson. And Robin? He roars at Mrs Stimpson, who humours him by appearing to be very flurried and rushing energetically to and fro at his behest. He also develops an interest in oriental mythology, and buys several books of tantric mándalas and prayer-wheels. One day Debbie goes up to his room and finds a new kind of painting on the easel, geometric, brightly coloured, highly organised, a kind of woven pattern of flames and limbs with a recurring motif of a dark, glaring face with red eyes and a protruding red tongue. ‘Kali the Destroyer,’ says Mrs Stimpson, knowledgeably at Debbie’s elbow. ‘It’s a picture of Kali the Destroyer.’ It is not right, thinks Debbie, that the black goddess should be a simplified travesty of Sheba Brown, that prolific weaver of bright webs. But at the same time she recognises a new kind of loosed, slightly savage energy in Robin’s use of colour and movement. ‘It’s got something,’ says Mrs Stimpson pleasantly. ‘I do really think it’s got something.’ Debbie has to agree. It has indeed got something.