Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:
Next book on the shelf is another short story collection – this one called Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice
The first story in this collection is called Crocodile Tears. Patricia Nimmo and her husband stand in an art gallery on a Sunday afternoon. They have been married for many years, have two grown children. This is a Sunday ritual – they like to go look at art and talk about it. They are very often in sync – not only in their tastes, but also in museum-behavior. You know how some people like to zip thru museums? And others like to linger for 25 minutes in front of one painting? Neither approach is correct, obviously – but it’s nice to be in sync on such matters if youre going to a museum togehter … and the Nimmos, as a team, always have the same impulse to move on at the same time. Patricia Nimmo has never before seriously contemplated the question: “When are you done with seeing?” Meaning: when do you know, at a museum, that is time to move on to the next painting? And what does that mean … to be done with seeing? How does that work? Is there a saturation point? These questions all come up later in the story, and they are devastating to Patricia … On this particular Sunday they have a rare disagreement about a painting – Tony likes it, Patricia doesn’t – and she judges him for liking it. He sees something in it she does not. She argues for her position, Tony says he wants to buy the painting. She’s annoyed. How can he not see how cliched and bland the work is? It has NO depth. She leaves him contemplating the bad (to her) painting and moves on thru the gallery by herself, feeling that the day is ruined. As she continues to browse, she starts to hear vaguely the sound of sirens … and begins to be aware of a commotion elsewhere in the gallery. She strolls back through, looking for her husband – and she comes across him – He is lying on the floor in the middle of the main room, and he is surrounded by emergency workers, and ambulance drivers – there is a stretcher – and Patricia hears someone say, “He’s dead – just had a massive heart attack and died …”
Patricia then does something shocking. It’s shocking because even though we are only 5 pages into the story, we think we know her, and we think we know her relationship with her husband – even though they were just having a disagreement. She walks out of the gallery, walks home, packs a small bag, gets on a train, and goes to southern France. She gets off the train randomly – no plans … and finds herself in N�mes. She has not notified her children of where she is. She has fled the scene of her husband’s death. She has left England without a trace. Byatt, in the writing, makes it clear that Patricia sometimes had such fantasies … “what would it be like if …” so when the moment came, she took it.
She does not weep for her husband (not at first). She knows her kids are capable to deal with funeral arrangements – they’re adults.
Patricia checks into a gorgeous hotel and basically starts a new life in this small hot French town. She wants to learn French. She buys a copy of Proust’s a la recherche, etc., and a dictionary. The hot sun beats down (you can see the “fire” element in action throughout this story … it’s all about heat and light) … Patricia is a blank. We do not know what she is thinking or feeling. But we do know what she is seeing, we see thru her eyes – the things she looks at, the little field trips she takes, what she eats. She lives in complete solitude.
Until she finally meets (at his insistence) a dude named Nils Isaksen – who is also staying at her hotel. A Norwegian. Two cold northern people in a hot hot place. He tries to engage her – just in conversations about the history of N�mes, the Roman remnants (that’s where the title comes from – a Roman coin found in the town that has a crocodile on it – so the town is full of crocodile statues and fountains, etc. Ahem. The launching-off-point image at the beginning of the story is an actual Roman coin – with the “crocodile de N�mes” on it – If you scroll down here, you can see it) … Patricia has no interest in learning about N�mes. Or the history. She just wants to become a nothing, a blank. She goes to a museum and finds it vaguely upsetting – because she no longer knows when to stop looking at something. She always knew with her husband. Now she is adrift.
Nils Isaksen is also a widower … but Patricia does not share with Nils that she upped and left the second her husband died. That’s not for him to know.
Anyway – there’s way more – this is basically just the set-up … it’s a lovely story, beautifully written. Here’s an excerpt.
One quick thing. I love the phrase “yawning vegetably”. Love it so much.
Excerpt from Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice
After this they had several more brief drinks together, in the evenings, which were getting hotter, and heavier. Patricia did not think she liked Nils Isaksen, and also felt that this simply did not matter. The nerve-endings with which she had once felt out the shape of other people’s feelings were severed or numbed. She got no further than acknowledging to herself that he was in some way a driven man. His reading and writing were extravagant, his concentration theatrical, his covering of the paper – wrong somehow, too much, or was it that she felt that any effort, any energy, was too much? The pleasure was going out of A la recherche, though she persisted, and her French improved. They talked about N�mes. He told her things she hadn’t wanted to know, hadn’t been at all anxious about, which nevertheless changed her ideas. He told her that the city and the water of the fountain, Fons Nemausis, were one single thing; that this closed, walled collection of golden houses with red-tiled roofs in a dustbowl in the garrigue had been built because of the presence of the powerful source. That the god of the town, Nemausus, was the god of the source. That under and beyond it were gulfs, caverns, galleries of water in the hill. That there had been a nunnery on the hill above the fountain, around the temple of Diana, from the year 1000 to the Renaissance, whose abbesses had claimed ownership of the water. He spoke of excavations, of pagan antiquities, of religious wars of resistance to Simon de Montfort, to Louis XIV, to the Germans. He spoke of the guillotine in the revolution, and the gibbet in the Second World War. Patricia listened, and then went shopping, or wandering. She thought, if he talked much more, or overstepped some boundary, she would have to move on. But she did not know where she would go. The weather was getting hotter. The weather-map on the television in her room showed that N�mes was almost invariably the hottest city in France, uncooled by coastal breezes, or mountain winds, a city on a plain, absorbing heat and ight. She took longer walks, for variation. She went into the Jardin de la Fontaine in the midday heat, stared into the green troubled depths, climbed the unshaded, formal staircase with its balustrades, observed a crocodile made of bronze-leaved plants in a bed of rose and white flowers, curving its tail over its back, yawning vegetably, in the dancing bright air. Nils Isaksen told her she shouldn’t go out without a hat. She wanted to reply that she didn’t care. She said ‘I know’ but did not buy a hat. Let it bake her brain, something said.
One evening Nils Isaksen broke his cautious bounds. Patricia was very tired. She had taken three eaux-de-vie Mirabelle, instead of one, and saw the cedars shifting across the too spangling stars.
‘I should be happy,’ said Nils Isaksen, ‘if you would come with me to the ethnological museum. I should like to show you …’
‘Oh, no.’
‘I should like to show you the tombstones of the gladiators. So young. We can read the life of a city, in its monuments–‘
‘No, no –‘
‘Forgive me, I think you should make some change. I am impertinent. When I first lost Liv, I wished the whole world to be dead, too. Frozen stiff, I wished everything to be. But I exist. And you, forgive me, you exist.’
‘I don’t need company, Mr Isaksen. I don’t need to be — entertained. I have — I have things to do.’
Before his intervention, something had been going on, in the silence. He had spoiled it. She stared angrily at him.
‘Forget I spoke, please. I am in need of speech, from time to time, but that is nothing to do with you, as I can understand.’
The dreadful thing was that her refusal had made more of an event, had brought them closer together.
