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Authors: A.S. Byatt

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BOOK: Little Black Book of Stories
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HE THOUGHT of Daisy Whimple again when the Hospital Art Collection Committee met in the board-room, under Sir Eli Pettifer’s Dutch painting of the anatomy lesson. There stood the doctor, stretching out the taut umbilical cord in two fastidious fingers. There lay the dead child, its belly opened like a flower, still attached to the veined medusa-like mound, which had been part of its mother. There stood the black-robed Dutchmen, looking solemnly at the painter. There, oddly, was a small boy, aged perhaps ten, also black-robed, holding up the skeleton of a child of roughly the same size as the peaceful corpse under dissection. The skull smiled; skulls always do; it was the only smile in the serious painting. Martha Sharpin, who was early for the meeting, like Damian, said to him that it was historically interesting as to whether the skeletal child was a religious
memento mori
or simply an anatomical demonstration. She believed it must be religious, because of the odd age of the child who held it up. Damian said that as a lapsed Catholic he wanted to believe it was simply an elegant way of presenting anatomical facts. He had a horror, he said, of the musty world of relics and bits of skin and bone which ought no longer to have meaning if their ex-inhabitants were in heaven. Martha Sharpin said he was forgetting the resurrection of the body, for one thing. And for another, the stillborn were not in heaven but in limbo, forever unbaptised.

“Are you a Catholic?”

“No,” said Martha Sharpin, “an art historian.”

Martha represented the Spice Merchants’ Foundation on the Committee. She was the Foundation’s Arts Co-ordinator, new to the job, having succeeded Letitia Holm, an elderly aesthete from the second generation of Bloomsbury. She was regarded, with approval, as “new blood” by the distinguished trustees of the Foundation, and also with suspicion, as very young, and possibly lacking gravitas. She had a Courtauld Ph.D.—her subject had been the
Vanitas
in seventeenth-century painting—and a subsequent qualification in arts administration. She was in her thirties, with smooth, dark, well-cut hair and a strong-featured bony face. Her skin was golden, possibly with a hint of the oriental. She had very black brows and lashes, and dark chocolate-brown eyes: she appeared to wear no make-up, and appeared to need none. She wore the usual well-cut black trouser suit, and a scarf made of some shimmering permanently pleated textile in silver-blue, pinned, with a large glass mosaic brooch, into a shape that resembled the stocks and neckties of the people in the painting. Damian Becket liked the look of her. This was the second time they had met, the second committee meeting they had both attended. She had decided he was the mover and shaker of this committee, and that she needed to get to know him. She said:

“I have to say, the installation in the entrance hall is marvellous. Makes you want to sing, which is hard, in a hospital. Letitia told me you were the one with the ideas.”

“Letitia was very helpful to me about where to buy things for myself. I buy prints. My very first was a print by Bert Irvin called
Magdalen.
We bought one for the second floor, too. Rushing coloured forms, with grey. I puzzled about why it was called Magdalen—being a lapsed Catholic. Irvin names his work quite arbitrarily for the roads round his studio. I like that. Grey road, rushing colours.”

“You collect?”

“I wouldn’t call it that. I buy prints. Tell me about Joseph Beuys.”

The connection seemed odd to Martha, who raised her thick brows and opened her mouth, just as the rest of the committee came in. An almoner, a nursing supervisor, the bursar, a representative from the Art College, a junior lawyer from the Spice Merchants. The Art College representative was a performance artist whose attendance and attention at the meetings were both erratic. When he spoke, which was very infrequently, he spoke in sentences like unravelling knitting, with endless dependent clauses depending on dependent clauses ending in lacunae and stuttering. Letitia Holm had disliked and despised him. She said his conversation was like his art, which consisted of a kind of hopeless-Houdini self-suspension from anything upright—lamp-posts, railway bridges, river bridges—in cradles or bags of knotted ropes of all thicknesses. Damian did not know what Martha Sharpin thought of him. He needed to find out.

The meeting wound on. Damian reported the purchase of a painting by Thérèse Oulton and the gift by an anonymous donor of some prints by Tom Phillips. The nursing supervisor reported on the scheme for ward decoration by the art students. She said there had been problems with someone trying to bring unhygienic things into the ward with the incubators. And some of the students had started things and not come back, leaving bits of mistletoe and oranges with cloves, cluttering the Surgical Ward. Damian Becket said he thought the decoration of the Gynae Ward had been very successful, very imaginative and unusual. He thought they should thank Miss Whimple. He asked Joey Blount, the performance artist, if he knew Miss Whimple. Not personally, said Joey Blount. Not at all, actually.

The meeting always ended with the problem of Eli Pettifer’s Collection, which was always deferred. It was a condition of the bequest—and of all Pettifer’s other munificent bequests—that the Collection should be maintained and appropriately displayed. And there it was, in boxes, and old display cabinets you couldn’t make your way between. Daunting. They’d once had a real cataloguer, said the Bursar, who had been in there for six months, and got very depressed by the dust and the darkness. She turned out to have catalogued
one
box
when she left, according to a system no one could make head or tail of. Moreover, she’d developed a mystery virus, which she claimed must have come out of the boxes, and had threatened to sue the hospital.

Martha asked whether the Collection was labelled. Yes, said the Bursar, most of it had little hand-written stickers and tags. It was hard to know where to start, he said gloomily. Martha said she would like to see it. The Bursar said this was more than Letitia had offered to do. Letitia was squeamish. Martha said she herself was not, and would take a look at what was there. Damian said he would be happy to show her round.

So Damian Becket and Martha Sharpin made a clanking descent in the steel cage into the bowels of the hospital. The door to the Collection was opened by a coded keyboard: Damian punched in his code and pushed it open. Martha Sharpin exclaimed at the extent of it. There were several rooms, opening off a central one which had a little murky daylight from a thick glass window let into the pavement above, through which they could see the soles of passing feet. There were rooms within rooms, made of crates and packing-cases. There were cabinets along the walls of the rooms containing shelf after shelf of medical implements and curiosities. Martha walked along, staring in. Damian followed her. Shelf after shelf after shelf of syringes: cartridge syringes, laryngeal syringes, varicose vein syringes, haemorrhoid syringes, lachrymal syringes, exhausting syringes, made from ivory and ebony, brass and steel. From another cabinet shelf after shelf of glass eyes stared at them from neatly segmented boxes, or squinnied higgledy-piggledy, like collections of marbles. There were bottles—ancient tear-bottles, ornate pharmacy bottles in pale rose with gilded letters, preserving jars, specimen jars. There were surgical and gynaecological implements, repeated, repeated. Saws and vices, forceps and tweezers, stethoscopes, breast-pumps and urinary bottles. Shelves of artificial nipples, lead and silver, rubber and bakelite. Prostheses of all kinds, noses, ears, breasts, penises, wooden hands, mechanical hands, wire feet, booted feet, artificial buttocks, endless faded hair, in coils, in tangles, in envelopes with the names of the dead men and women from whom it had been clipped. There were specimens also. Human brains and human testicles in jars of formaldehyde. Shelves of foetuses, monkeys, armadillos, rats, sows, boys, girls and an elephant. Monsters also, humans and creatures born with no head, or two heads, stunted arms or spare fingers, conjoined twins and wizened hair-balls. One case, which was arranged with some aesthetic intention, contained a series of nineteenth-century glass ornamental domes—or maybe museum exhibits— in which foetal skeletons were at play with wreaths of dried flowers, wax grapes, skeleton leaves and branches of dead coral. Others contained wax humans divided vertically, fleshed and clothed on the left hand, polished skeleton and skull on the right. Martha lingered over these. She had seen similar things, but never so many, never so strange. Damian pulled open a tall crate from which woodshavings were emerging. Inside was what looked like a white statue of a goddess, a young woman with closed eyes and a curiously flaccid surface, folds of flesh rolling back towards her spine. He realised that she should be lying on her back, and saw that she was swollen to bursting, a full-term gravid woman. Then he bent to read the label, and saw that what he was seeing was the plaster cast made from the body of one Mercy Parker. He remembered that such plaster casts were made for teaching purposes. The deliquescent flesh was the other side of rigor mortis.

He closed her in again, and went back to Martha Sharpin, who was intent on a collection of small ivory women, some occidental, some oriental, each a few inches long, lying in various postures, curved for sleep, or extended. They all had removable, thimble-sized navel-and-stomach, which could display, and did, the miniature heart, lungs and intestines, or the curled foetus in the womb. Martha asked Damian if they were diagnostic or votive. He said he didn’t know. He said, thinking of the lead nipples which must have poisoned what they were intended to purify, that the whole thing was a collection of attempts to preserve and lengthen life, which nevertheless bore witness to human interventions that had drastically shortened it. He pointed at the early gynaecological forceps.

“A huge step forward. But spreading puerperal fever wherever they were used. What am I going to do, Dr. Sharpin?”

“Martha, please. You need someone to make a start on conservation advice and cataloguing. Someone brave, who won’t get bogged down, and won’t be slapdash.”

“Do you know such a paragon?”

“No. But I could work on it—say one afternoon a week—myself, and get it into a state where it could be handed over to a proper curator.”

Damian said he could think of no better solution. Martha said she would be glad if he could provide a dogsbody—someone to lift and dust, and help with labels.

The image of Daisy Whimple, a little inappropriately, visited Damian’s mind.

“I know an art student. She did some good decorations in the Gynae Ward, for Christmas.”

“She’d need to be able to spell. It’s often not their strong point.”

Damian had no idea whether Daisy could spell. Nor, when he asked in the ward, did any of the nurses know where she lived. Nor when, with unusual persistence for an overworked man, he called the Art College, could they enlighten him, though they promised to speak to her if she came in to classes, which, they said, she mostly didn’t. Later, Damian wondered why he hadn’t asked them for a competent student who could spell.

Martha Sharpin began her foray at the Collection. She only rarely saw Damian Becket. One day, when they met by pseudo-accident in the lift, she asked if his hours were regular enough for her to take him out to a meal, to talk over a project she had, to put artists in residence into hospitals. She thought he was the doctor who might see the point. Damian liked being asked out to dinner by this handsome sensible woman, who carried her knowledge lightly, and made life more interesting for many people. He found her attractive. He liked looking at women with good clothes,
on
their bodies, so to speak. He saw a lot of female flesh, slippery and sweating, even provocatively pouting and posturing at him. He liked the way Martha’s sweaters moved easily around her waist—the sense that she was in control of herself. When they had their dinner, in a dockside restaurant overlooking the rolling grey mist on the Thames, and the snaking lights of the police launches, he admired her trouser suit, wine-coloured this time, fluid and well-cut, ornamented with another glass mosaic brooch in the shape of a paisley dangling an absurd pink pearl. He remarked on it. She said it was “an Andrew Logan. Called Goddess. It has tiny feathers embedded in it, look. Cosmic fertility.”

They enjoyed their dinner. She explained the difficulties of placing artists in residence. They had had one once who wanted to photograph breast cancers, blow up the prints, and install them in the patients’ waiting area. “They were spectacular photographs,” she said, “but inappropriate. Or too
appropriating.
Photography has that quality. They weren’t, so to speak, the artist’s own cancers to display.”

Damian said he supposed there was no sense placing an abstract colourist in a ward or a waiting-room. Martha asked if he’d found the art student he thought might help with the collection. What sort of work did she do?

“Well, the decorations were ingenious and colourful. I did get the impression she was so to speak slumming. She said she did installations. She mentioned Beuys.”

“Ah, so that was why you suddenly asked about him—”

“I don’t really know about him.”

Martha said he was a great artist who dealt in dark things made of common materials.

“Fat and felt.”

“Exactly. Usually on a large scale. Reliquaries of no religion. Things evoking wars and prison camps. He’s probably the greatest single influence on art students today. They do
personal versions
—you know, the fish slice that my girlfriend didn’t clean, the knickers I wore when I first kissed Joe Bloggs—the disk collection I pinched from my ex-lover—the purely personal. I am an artist so my relics
are art.
I’m not saying that’s your student’s line. She may really understand Beuys.”

Damian said he had no idea what she did or didn’t understand but he did know she was hungry. Anyway, he couldn’t find her. They had better look for another dogsbody. And it didn’t sound as though she’d be at all suitable for the placement.

THE NEXT DAY, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the white head and floating clothing whisk round the corner of a corridor. He strode on, making no sign that he had seen anything untoward, and suddenly turned back into the cupboard door she was standing inside.

BOOK: Little Black Book of Stories
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