Elementals by A.S. Byatt

like a princess, and came back to say goodbye to his friend.
    ‘Have a good time,’ said Bernard. ‘Beware of philosophers.’
    ‘Where would I find any philosophers?’ asked Raymond, who had done theatre design at art school with Bernard and now designed sets for a successful children’s TV programme called
The
A-Mazing Maze of Monsters
. ‘Philosophers are extinct. I think your wits are turning, old friend, with stomping around on your own. You need a girlfriend.’
    ‘I don’t,’ said Bernard. ‘Have a good holiday.’
    ‘We’re going to be married,’ said Raymond, looking surprised, as though he himself had not known this until he said it. The face of Melanie swam at the car window, the pearly teeth visible inside the soft lips, the dark eyes staring. ‘I must go,’ said Raymond. ‘Melanie’s waiting.’
    Left to himself, Bernard settled back into the bliss of solitude. He looked at his latest work and saw that it was good. Encouraged, he looked at his earlier work and saw that that was good, too. All those blues, all those curious questions, all those almost-answers. The only problem was, where to go now. He walked up and down, he remembered the philosopher and laughed. He got out his Keats. He reread the dreadful moment in
Lamia
where the bride vanished away under the coldly malevolent eye of the sage.
    Do not all charms fly
    At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine – Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made The tender-personed Lamia melt into a shade.
    Personally, Bernard said to himself, he had never gone along with Keats about all that stuff. By philosophy Keats seems to mean natural science, and personally he, Bernard, would rather have the optical mysteries of waves and particles in the water and light of the rainbow than any old gnome or fay. He had been at least as interested in the problems of reflection and refraction when he had had the lovely snake in his pool as he had been in its oddity – in its
otherness
– as snakes went. He hoped that no natural scientist would come along and find Melanie’s blood group to be that of some sort of herpes, or do an X-ray and see something odd in her spine. She made a very good blowzy sort of a woman, just right for Raymond. He wondered what sort of a woman she would have become for him, and dismissed the problem. He didn’t want a woman. He wanted another visual idea. A mystery to be explained by rule and line. He looked around his breakfast table. A rather nondescript orange-brown butterfly was sipping the juice of the rejected peaches. It had a golden eye at the base of its wings and a rather lovely white streak, shaped like a tiny dragon-wing. It stood on the glistening rich yellow peach-flesh and manoeuvred its body to sip the sugary juices and suddenly it was not orange-brown at all, it was a rich, gleaming intense purple. And then it was both at once, orange-gold and purple-veiled, and then it was purple again, and then it folded its wings and the undersides had a purple eye and a soft green streak, and tan, and white edged with charcoal . . .
    When he came back with his paintbox it was still turning and sipping. He mixed purple, he mixed orange, he made browns. It was done with a dusting of scales, with refractions of rays. The pigments were discovered and measured, the scales on the wings were noted and
seen
, everything was a mystery, serpents and water and light. He was off again. Exact study would not clip this creature’s wings, it would dazzle his eyes with its brightness. Don’t go, he begged it, watching and learning, don’t go. Purple and orange is a terrible and violent fate. There is months of work in it. Bernard attacked it. He was happy, in one of the ways in which human beings are