Read Online Little Black Book of Stories by A.S. Byatt - Free Book Online

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