Sugar and Other Stories

by A. S. Byatt

  Bridget spoke. She spoke with disproportionate urgency, as though saying something she needed to say, that was not quite called for now, but could be inserted in their talk. “In Tokyo,” she said, “I had breakfast every day with the family’s grandfather, who was dead. He was present at every meal — his picture, anyway, in the middle of the table — we all bowed to it, and he had his own little servings of meals. They all went off to work at some unearthly hour so by the time I ate there was only me and him — and the maid brought tea for both of us, and asked him respectfully if he’d enjoyed it. He was a terribly fierce-looking old man. It was his house. They consulted him about everything.”

  There was a little silence. Then Bridget and Joanna spoke simultaneously. Bridget said, “I’m sorry: it was all rather a culture-shock: I was quite frightened, actually: I just wanted to say …”

  Joanna said, “I’m quite sure death is the end. I’m sure one just goes nowhere, as one came from nowhere. I’m sure.”

  Mike said, “I think I’ll ring my dentist and make you an emergency appointment, Joanna. I shall charge it to the Survey. I’ve done it before. In the interests of efficiency, I shall say. You look a bit washed-out.” He touched both their arms. The young woman looked up at him, quick, electric, wanting contact and reassurance. Joanna looked down at her desk, remembering. She was embarrassed — yes, that was the exact word — to feel Mike moving into a place that had always been cramped by the exigencies of her parents. She supposed she had loved him, though she had never for a moment doubted that he preferred his wife to her — both in and out of bed — and this certainty had made her morally comfortable, not guilty about his wife, not desirous of supplanting her. Now she thought, watching him telephone, that although she had ancestors, she would not be one, she was the end of some genetic string. Was she unnatural not to have wanted him — or someone — more? What she wanted, was the time back. The empty desert and her own young eyes, watching for signs of life, out of a young face in a young body. Her tooth shrilled. Mike put down the phone. “Mr Kestelman will see you right away,” he said. “He’s got another emergency patient there. He’ll manage to help you both as quickly as possible. I’ll order you a cab, Joanna.”

  The dentist’s waiting-room was white and streamlined, somewhere between the modernist and the clinical. Its walls were white and its tables spotless and unscratched white melamine: its lighting came from huge opaque white bowls, suspended or supported on chrome. It was like a time capsule in a science fiction film, colourless, and therefore about equally soothing and alarming. No flowers, not a speck of dust. It was already inhabited by a restless woman when Joanna arrived. The other emergency case. Joanna sat on a white tweed sofa, slung on chrome with leather bands, and put her feet together on an off-white Berber rug. The other woman, sitting opposite, leafed through and again through a heap of glossy magazines. She had pure white hair arranged in curls round her face and in a longer fall to her shoulders: this white had a spun-silk, glossy quality, full of vitality. Her skin was, by contrast, darkish, moist though, not desiccated. She was difficult to put an age to. She wore a puce angora sweater, with a low scoop neckline, embroidered with iridescent bugles and beads: the perceivable edge of her breasts seemed rounded and lively, with a few freckles. She was made up, lavishly but not grotesquely, a fuchsia lipstick to match the angora, huge hoops of violet shadow between black lashes and silver eyebrows. She wore gipsyish hooped earrings, silver, not gold. Joanna put a hand to her own jaw and gave the other an opening.

  “Does it hurt? Does it hurt badly?”

  “Pretty bad.”

  “I’m a coward about pain. Or I used to be, I should say, before things changed. Mr Kestelman thinks I’ve got an abscess. I only came here as a last resort. I’m ashamed, really. I tried healing by other means, but it didn’t work.”

  “Other means?”

  “What you might call faith healing. Spiritual healing. I have the gift. It is a marvellous gift, I don’t know if you know anything about it, I developed it only fairly recently. I’ve achieved extraordinary things, marvellous cures, mysterious things, but for some reason I can’t soothe away this pain. Physician, heal thyself, and all that. My theory is, the pain distracts me from the necessary concentration. My husband said I should give conventional medicine a go, it also exists in the world for a reason, and has helped many, don’t you agree, so here I am.’

  “How did you discover you had the gift?” asked Joanna, politely and with some curiosity.

  “It’s a fairly frequent consequence of an NDE. I didn’t know that at the time, naturally. But it turns out, many of those who experience NDEs have these gifts.”

  “NDE?”

  “Near Death Experience. I was clinically dead, and brought back. Really.” She laughed, and Joanna laughed, and both put their hands to their painful faces. “I had a heart attack, two years ago now — you wouldn’t think it to look at me, would you? — and I was clinically dead, stopped breathing, everything, and then they brought me back. And when I was dead, I had this wonderful experience. It changed my life. Changed absolutely.”

  “Tell me,” said Joanna, who would have been told anyway, who had encountered her own Ancient Mariner, in this antechamber. The other swung into a well-polished narration, impeded by twinges of dental agony.

  “I didn’t mention it for ages, I thought I wouldn’t be believed. But I knew all along it was true, truer than most things, if you see what I mean, more true. There I was, swimming as it were, up and up, away from myself — I could see myself lying there, it was in an underpass at Pimlico tube station actually — I could see this body lying there like a banana-skin someone had dropped — and there was I, moving away quite fast up a kind of tunnel — or funnelthing — and at the other end was a sort of opening and an indescribable light, ever so bright. And more than anything I wanted to go through that door. It was bliss. Bliss. I can’t describe it. When I got near, there were Figures, who Opened, and I came out into a kind of green place — a clean green place, all washed clean, it made me see how polluted our poor earth is — you’ve never dreamed such green — and there across a field was a little bungalow, ever such a lovely bungalow, with a garden brimming with every kind of peony, and I thought: Mum would have loved that, she always said her idea of heaven was a labour-saving bungalow and a garden full of peonies — and when I came to the door, there they all were, inside, Mum and Dad, and Uncle Charlie I never liked much, and my auntie Beryl, and a quietish lady who I knew was my grandmother, though I’d never set eyes on her, she died before I was born, I proved it later from photographs. They were all sort of young and healthy-looking. The scent of those peonies. Mum was baking cakes, and I stood in the doorway and said, “Oh Mum, can I come in, oh can I come in, how good it all looks.” And Mum said, “No, you can’t come now. This cake is for your uncle Jack. Not you. It’s not your time. You must go back. You are needed back there.” And a shining kind of person, dark-skinned like a Red Indian maybe, came up the path, and said — he didn’t exactly speak but I heard him tell me, no, Bonnie, you’ve got to go back, it isn’t your time, there are things for you to do, and people who need you. And then I was back in my body in intensive care in St George’s and I heard them cry out, she’s breathing. Ever since then, I’ve known. I’ve known death was good and not frightening. But all the rest — the healing and the clairvoyance and all that — I discovered when I joined the Academy.”

  “The Academy?”

  “The Academy of the Return. We’re a research group and a therapeutic community. You see, it turns out that my experience wasn’t unusual really, not in terms of the other experiences of NDE. The experience seems to be the same — in all cultures and religions — the tunnel and the light and the figures, and seeing your parents again —”

  “I’ve just lost my mother,” said Joanna, involuntarily.

  “Well, there you are. We were brought together, because of your need to know what I have to impart. Our two toothaches were brought
about with a purpose, and that’s why I couldn’t cure mine, of course it is, our meeting was meant.”

  “But,” said Joanna, her face furiously stabbing. How can you say, I don’t want heaven, I want …

  A white-clothed figure beckoned from the inner room. “Mr Kestelman will see you now, Mrs Roote.”

  Mrs Roote rose, a little tremulously, looked to Joanna for reassurance, and crossed the threshold.

  Joanna remembered Molly, in her last few months, complaining of noises. Joanna did not wish to remember the exact nature of these complaints, but they rose in her mind, with a difference. It was Molly’s habit to wake herself with an automatic radio-teamaker, so that the voices of the world’s news and the chatter and gossip of the BBC’s presenters mingled with the vanishing veils of her uneasy sleep and the half-apprehended creatures of dream and nightmare. Or so Joanna now imagined, having tried out the device herself once and found her mind slipping in and out of what she vaguely felt were Molly’s apprehensions and not her own. Anyway, she had thought Molly’s last visions, if they could be dignified with that name, were functions of that domestic machinery. Molly, it was fair to admit, had insisted that they were not. She had asked for sympathy which Joanna had failed to offer. “I don’t know often,” she had said, trying to characterize these experiences, “if I’m waking or sleeping, I don’t know where I am, either, but I do hear your grandparents, dear, quarrelling dreadfully in the next room, ever so close, and it’s as though I can’t quite be heard or seen yet, but I might be at any minute, they might turn on me and draw me into it at any minute, and I always tried so hard not to be drawn in …”

  And once, “Oh, Joanna, they are waiting for me — I almost said, lying in wait, but that would be an awful thing to say, about one’s own parents, wouldn’t it? I don’t want you to miss me, dear, when I’m gone, I want you to have a good time and know I was grateful for all you did, even if I’m a cantankerous old bitch a lot of the time. I’ve had my time, and that’s it, and if it wasn’t much of a time, it’s no good crying over spilt milk, is it?”

  And the next day, “I can hear more and more of what they’re saying, in the next room. Just as it always was, nothing changed. Ma feels neglected and Pa feels nagged and put-upon, just the same …”

  “Old memories are re-activated in your brain, mother. It’s usual. People remember things in their seventies they haven’t thought of for thirty years.”

  “I know. But I can’t sleep for their wrangling. And I can’t wake up enough to stop hearing it.”

  Bonnie Roote came out of the surgery, clutching a wad of tissues to her face, like a huge peony, the edges of its petals stained with bright pink lipstick and scarlet threads of blood. The attendant told Joannna Mr Kestelman would be ready in a moment. Bonnie Roote sat on the sofa, the side of her lively face swollen and awkward.

  “Was it bad?” said Joanna.

  Bonnie shook her head, indicating no. She mopped at her mouth. She opened her handbag, and held out a card to Joanna. She said, carefully, slurring, “We were destined to meet, dear, that’s the meaning of it. Here is the address — come when you need us, if you need us.”

  The card said, “The Academy of the Return. Thanatology and the study of the Afterlife. Therapeutic groups: spiritual and physical health alike our concern. We may have the answers to the questions you have always been asking. Try us.”

  Mr Kestelman, taciturn and scientific in his sterile workplace, removed one of Joanna’s teeth, which, he explained, had had a mosaic of tiny cracks and had finally crumbled altogether. Joanna must not, on any account, he said, disturb the blood-clot, which would eventually form the new gum in the gap. Joanna tasted blood, iron and gravy combined, and felt the temporary absence of a huge segment of her head. She nodded with heavy gravity to his instructions, which included going home immediately and lying down, trying to have a sleep, to get over the shock. Munificent in small things, he filled her handbag with paper tissues and little strips of encapsulated painkillers in foil. “You’ll feel queasy when it comes back to life, at first,” he told her. “But don’t worry. It doesn’t last.” He told her not to explore with her tongue and she withdrew its tip guiltily from what felt like a huge soft cabbage of congealing flabby matter, replacing the lost grinder, the shining citadel of the toothpaste advertisements of her childhood. Under lost childish teeth, fringed and rootless, had been the purposeful saw-ridge of the mature, the real thing. She remembered the taste and the intricacy. It was a shock that there would, this time, be no replacement.

  The house was unwelcoming, rebarbative and reproachful. She hurried through it, ignoring it, to her bedroom, and drew the curtains for the prescribed lying-down. Then she got up again and opened them. Closed curtains in daylight meant death. The good weather persisted: let the sun shine in. It didn’t shine in, much: Joanna’s room was not on the sunny side of the house. She got into the bed, in her petticoat, and closed her eyes; her inner vision immediately projected, on a screen, a terrible horse head, a stripped skull long in the tooth, its empty sockets and gaunt jaws running with pale carnation-coloured blood, the colour of the inside of her eyelid no doubt, crawling on the ivory bones, long, long in the tooth. Joanna said to herself, precisely, that loss of a tooth aroused all sorts of primitive fears and opened her eyes waterily focussing on the pelmet, the dressing-table, the silk lampshade. When she closed her eyes again all she could see was the carnation colour, turbulent in tossing waves. She sighed, and slept.

  There were voices in the next room. Aggrieved voices, running on in little dashes like a thwarted beck clucking against pebble-beds and rooted impediments. They had the ease of long custom and the abrasiveness of new rage. Joanna could not put words together, only the tone, which pricked the skin of her shoulders, primeval hackles shaved away by centuries of civilization. She could hear other sounds: the clink of teacups and once, surely, the angry smack of iron on ironing board. Sleep and throbbing washes of toothache insulated her for a while but she had in the end to acknowledge that she was awake and that the yammer persisted; it could not be extinguished, as she had extinguished the horsehead, by appeal to daylight. She got up and walked to and fro in her bedroom, and the voices in the next room sharpened and faded as she approached and retreated. She could see this nonexistent room very clearly, a dusty place, with a table, two chairs, a gas cooker and a high, inaccessible closed window. The room next to hers was in fact an airing-cupboard; she went to open its door, where its innocent shelves held her innocent nightdresses, tidily folded. The voices spoke beyond their flimsy wall. “I shall put the house on the market,” Joanna told the airing-cupboard, to see if her live voice would banish these dusty ones. They rustled furiously. Phrases came through. “No consideration … No imagination …” And then, “Out of sight, out of mind, I see.” And then, silence. She could not see why silence should ever have supervened. Or for how long it might last.

  She put the house on the market. The estate agent, Mr Maw, called, and Joanna showed him over it, room by room, and lastly the garden, early one morning before she left for the Survey. In the garden, swifts swooped and a blackbird sang, and the pergola roses breathed soft and sweet. In the house Mr Maw was effusive. A delightful property, he said, entering its vital statistics on a kind of abstract map on yellow paper, as Mr Kestelman had earlier entered Joanna’s ravaged or vanished teeth on some archetypal mouth-plan. He paced the rooms, measuring them with his bright black shoes, toe to heel. In parts of the house, even while he was there, the voices hissed and jangled. It was as though these brick walls were interwoven with some other tough, flexible, indestructible structure, containing other rooms, other vistas, other jammed doors. Like a dress and its lining, with the slimmest space between. He should have no trouble selling this lovely residence, Mr Maw told Joanna, in such good repair and so tastefully done up. Anyone could see it had been lived in very happily: it was homely, it had good vibrations, you came to recognize them in his business. It must be a real wrench for Miss Hope,
leaving this pleasant spot. Could he recognize bad vibrations, Joanna asked him? Oh yes, he assured her. Like the smell of unattended drains, on very rare occasions. He had had a client once who had had to resort to an exorcist. The property had been brimful of rage and hatred. You could feel it like a temperature change, like a damp chill, coming over the threshold. Now here, you can feel love and consideration, like the polish on good furniture. Joanna said, I mean to travel. I never meant to settle down in this way. This was my mother’s house, my mother’s idea of. She could not say, of what. Nor did Mr Maw want to know. He said he was sure she would find a nice holiday abroad very restorative, and then he could perhaps help her to find a labour-saving little maisonette.

  Mike found her crying amongst the filing-cabinets in the Survey Record Room. She did not say that she had been looking up their official report on the North African desert road, which had concluded in fact that it need never be built, that there was not enough demand. She had been thinking of the close bright stars, the bargaining in the bazaar, the heat in the jeep. Mike made her a plastic beaker of nasty but welcome coffee and put his arm round her shoulder. “Poor old Jo,” he said, and she did not take offence, for that was what he had said then, when the mosquitoes bit her and her feet blistered. “Poor old Jo. What’s up exactly?”