The Matisse Stories by A.S. Byatt

Gerda Himmelblau he carries insidehimself some chamber of ice inside which sits his figure of pain, his version of kind Kay thick-spoken and malevolent in a hospital hospitality-chair.
    The middle-aged Chinese man brings a plate of orange segments. They are bright, they are glistening with juice, they are packed with little teardrop sacs full of sweetness. When Perry Diss offers her the oranges she sees the old scars, well-made
efficient
scars, on his wrists. He says,
    Oranges are the real fruit of Paradise, I always think. Matisse was the first to understand orange, don’t you agree? Orange in light, orange in shade, orange on blue, orange on green, orange in black—
    ‘I went to see him once, you know, after the war, when he was living in that apartment in Nice. I was full of hope in those days, I loved him and was enraged by him and meant to outdo him, some time soon, when I had just learned this and that—which I never did. He was ill then, he had come through this terrible operation, the nuns who looked after him called him “le ressuscité”.
    ‘The rooms in that apartment were shrouded in darkness. The shutters were closed, the curtains were drawn. I was terribly shocked—I thought he
lived in the light
,you know, that was the idea I had of him. I blurted it out, the shock, I said, “Oh, how can you bear to shut out the light?” And he said, quite mildly, quite courteously, that there had been some question of him going blind. He thought he had better acquaint himself with the dark. And then he added, “and anyway, you know, black is the colour of light”. Do you know the painting
La Porte noire}
It has a young woman in an armchair quite at ease in a peignoir striped in lemon and cadmium and … over a white dress with touches of cardinal red—her hair is yellow ochre and scarlet—and at the side is the window and the coloured light and behind—above—is the black door. Almost no one could paint the colour black as he could. Almost no one.’
    Gerda Himmelblau bites into her orange and tastes its sweetness. She says,
    ‘He wrote, “I believe in God when I work.”’
    ‘I think he also said, “I am God when I work.” Perhaps he is—not my God, but where—where I find that. I was brought up in the hope that I would be a priest, you know. Only I could not bear a religion which had a tortured human body hanging from the hands over its altars. No, I would rather have
The Dance’
    Gerda Himmelblau is gathering her things together. He continues,
    ‘That is why I meant what I said, when I said that young woman’s—muck-spreading—offended what I called sacred. What are we to do? I don’t want her to—to punish us by self-slaughter—nor do I wish to be seen to condone the violence—the absence of
work
—’
    Gerda Himmelblau sees, in her mind’s eye, the face of Peggi Nollett, potato-pale, peering out of a white box with cunning, angry eyes in the slit between puffed eyelids. She sees golden oranges, rosy limbs, a voluptuously curved dark blue violin-case, in a black room. One or the other must be betrayed. Whatever she does, the bright forms will go on shining in the dark. She says,
    ‘There is a simple solution. What she wants, what she has always wanted, what the Department has resisted, is a sympathetic supervisor—Tracey Avison, for instance—who shares her way of looking at things—whose beliefs—who cares about political ideologies of that kind—who will—’
    ‘Who will give her a degree and let her go on in the way she is going on. It is a defeat.’
    Oh yes. It is a question of how much it matters. To you. To me. To the Department. To Peggi Nollett, too.’
    ‘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