Saturday 26th: Mathilde, Monday, School Trip

Mariette worked in lots of different media, but the paintings and needlework left Mathilde cold. She was more interested in the three dimensional creations: the paper and cardboard cottages and castles, the mermaids and shepherdesses sculpted from modelling clay, and – the thing that both fascinated and appalled her – aunt Mariette’s long-term project, the shell lamp. This was Mariette’s variation on a common theme of those times, which consisted of taking a large wine bottle (the wide, squat, shallow ones were a popular choice), drilling a hole through the base, and attaching a light bulb fitting to the neck before plastering the outside of the bottle with [DIY] filler and embedding sea shells into the wet filler. What made Mariette’s version unique was the range and richness of the sea shells she had at her disposal. These shells, which had edged their way up maybe a third of the bottle’s height in the year that the project had been in progress, were exotic and varied, the fruit of the final years of Jan’s work in the [diplomatic service], when his postings had taken him and Mariette to the Far East and the Southern Ocean. The unused shells in waiting are kept in a large old [QS] tin that still exudes a faint smell of chocolate when you squeeze the lid off it. There are spiral shells and shells like unicorn’s horns, bright red or blue shells and shells that are so pale that they’re almost translucent; there are ridged shells and spiky ones, and some with what look like jewels inlaid in them. Compared to the dull colours and limited forms that Mathilde has collected for herself on the northern sea shore, these are amazingly [exotic] and glamorous, and they speak of a sunlit world of flawless turquoise skies and white-sanded beaches shaded with palm trees – a world that she can only imagine, and which she can’t possibly expect to visit: those kind of places are not for ‘the likes of us’, but only for rich people and the favoured few who – like Uncle Jan – manage to escape from the [rigidly-defined confines of their culture].

Mathilde likes to spread out the shells on aunt Mariette’s work table and arrange them in complex symmetrical patterns. She spent a happy couple of hours doing just that last summer when she stayed with her aunt and uncle for a week while mum recovered from her operation, and she remembers her deep satisfaction at creating a beautifully symmetrical double spiral in blue, white and red. [Thinking about the finished perfection of the shape makes her feel sad – it’s gone, and she can never bring it back.

She turns over the shells that have their inside faces uppermost: she licks her fingers and uses the moisture to pick the shells up, her damp skin clinging to the glossy inner surfaces. She tries to get a shell to adhere to the end of each finger simultaneously, like a plate-spinner on a television variety show. Her fingers gradually take on a salty, sandy taste, and her tongue starts to feel gritty. [make sure that you add something here that very clearly demonstrates how these sense memories are tied into a particular emotional state/stage of her childhood development…something that channelled her creativity perhaps…a time when she was innocently imaginative, that beautiful period when you still bring an innocent and hopeful eye to everything, and when you can enjoy simple, unironic admiration for other people, and seek to emulate them without shame or self-consciousness…pre-self-consciousness, that’s the thing to zoom in on here, I think…]

The shell lamp – in its finished form – is now in Mathilde’s bedroom at home. After Mariette died, uncle Jan asked Mathilde what she would like as a keepsake, and she chose the lamp: [it’s so tangible, and has so many sense memories bound up in it…] she’s got mixed feelings about it now, a complex combination of love and regret, guilty snobbishness, and memories (invented?) of aunt Mariette in a white cotton dress and a straw sunhat, bending down over her with a smile on her face, surrounded by sunlight. The lamp is rather embarrassing now, in some ways – it looks so naff and 1970s, cheap and gauche in a clumsy, unsophisticated way. Nobody – or nobody with any taste – would dream of making such a thing now and displaying it in their living room: it has gone the way of bull fight posters and Elvis mirrors. Terminally kitsch. But it’s a connection with her aunt, and with her aunt’s past. It contains something of Mariette, something of her creativity and charm, her eye for detail and balance, and her commitment to getting the quality of her work right. She couldn’t help that this form of ‘artwork’ was inherently awful; it was a thing of its time, and there is no way that Mariette could have stepped outside of the cultural norms of her day and seen this lamp as people see it now. It has her innocence and open-mindedness embedded in it along with the shells. [there’s something here…an echo of the ‘all products of our environment and culture’ thing that chimes with (i) Jan’s upbringing and adherence to the state’s racist/persecutory norms, and (ii) the formation of Mathilde’s emotional habits/behaviours, and how she is still the prisoner of them…the difficulty of recognising and escaping your programming – especially the stuff that went in so early and so subtly, all that implicit stuff that no-one ever taught you explicitly…].

[…]

It’s over. The kids have all departed with the other teachers, and she’s made it through the day without a disaster. It actually went quite well, she thinks. She knows that, once she’s had a glass of wine tonight, she’ll half-convince herself that she should do this kind of thing more often. She also knows that, in the morning, her sense of euphoric relief will have dissipated, and she will know – with the conviction of the whole of her sunken heart – that it will be a long time before she has the confidence and mental strength to repeat the exercise. She’ll dread being asked to do it again by the head teacher, and she knows that she’ll be evasive and non-committal, pleading more urgent necessities and prior commitments.
For now, though, she’s going to savour her sense of achievement and her relief at the ordeal being over. She heads for her favourite coffee bar, crossing the traffic-heavy street in the dusk, breathing in the rich chemical smell of exhaust fumes, enjoying the vividness of the lights and the flow of people, and anticipating a hot milky coffee and a luxuriously overfilled Danish pastry.

(c. 1100 words)