Little Black Book of Stories

by A. S. Byatt

  HE WAS NOT SURE how Cicely Fox would react to this. He was by now somewhat obsessed by the idea of her, but did not feel that he knew her, in any way. He dreamed of her, often, sitting in the corner of his caravan with her neat hair, scarfed neck, and fragile, cobweb skin, studying him with her darkly hooded eyes. She was judging him for having abandoned, or not having learned, his craft. He knew that he had called up, created, this unnerving Muse. The real Cicely Fox was an elderly English lady, who wrote to please herself. She might well regard his actions as impermissible. She came to his class, but did not submit herself to his, or its judgement. But she judged. He was sure she judged.

  The prize he had so to speak put her in the way of winning was a propitiatory offering. He wanted— desperately—that she should be pleased, be happy, admit him to her confidence.

  HE GOT on his motor bike and drove for the first time to Miss Fox’s address, which was in a road called Primrose Lane, in a respectable suburb. The houses there were late Victorian semi-detached, and had a cramped look, partly because they were built of large blocks of pinkish stone, and there was something wrong with the proportions. The windows were heavy sash-windows, in black-painted frames. Cicely Fox’s windows were all veiled in heavy lacy curtains, not blue-white, but creamy-white, he noticed. He noticed the pruned rose bushes in the front garden, and the donkey-stoned sill of the front step. The door was also black, and in need of repainting. The bell was set in a brass boss. He rang. No one answered. He rang again. Nothing.

  He had worked himself up to this scene, the presentation of the letter, her response, whatever it was. He remembered that she was deaf. The gate to the side-alley round the house was open. He walked in, past some dustbins, and came into a back garden, with a diminutive lawn and some ragged buddleia. And a rotary clothes-drier, with nothing hanging from it. There was a back door, also standing above white-lined stone steps. He knocked. Nothing. He tried the handle, and the door swung inwards. He stood on the threshold and called.

  “Miss Fox! Cicely Fox! Miss Fox, are you there? It’s Jack Smollett.”

  THERE WAS STILL NO REPLY. He should have gone home at that point, he thought, over and over, later. But he stood there undecided, and then heard a sound, a sound like a bird trapped in a chimney, or a cushion falling from a sofa. He went in through the back door, and crossed a gaunt kitchen, of which he had afterwards only the haziest recollection—dingy wartime “utility” furniture, a stained sink, hospital-green cupboards, an ancient gas-cooker, one leg propped unsteadily on a broken brick. Beyond the kitchen was a hall, with a linoleum floor, and a curious smell. It was a smell both human and musty, the kind of smell overlaid in hospitals by disinfectant. There was no disinfectant here. The hall was dark. Dark, narrow stairs rose into darkness inside ugly boxed-in banisters. He went on tiptoe, creaking in his biking leathers, and pushed open a door into a dimly lit sitting-room. Opposite him, in a chair, was a moaning bundle with huge face, grey-skinned, blotched, furred with down, above which a few white hairs floated on a bald pink dome. The eyes were yellow, vague and bloodshot and did not seem to see him.

  In the opposite corner was an overturned television. Its screen was smeared with something that looked like blood. Next to it he saw a pair of naked feet, at the end of long, stringy, naked legs. The rest of the body was bent round the television. Jack Smollett had to cross the room to see the face, and until he saw it, did not think for a moment that it belonged to Cicely Fox. It was turned into the worn sprigged carpet, under a mass of dishevelled white hair. The whole naked body was covered with scars, scabs, stripes, little round burn marks, fresh wounds. There was a much more substantial wound in the throat. There was fresh blood on the forget-me-nots and primroses in the carpet. It was not nice. Cicely Fox was quite dead.

  The old creature in the chair made a series of sounds, a chuckle, a swallowing, a wheeze. Jack Smollett made himself go across and ask her, what has happened, who . . . is there a telephone? The lips flapped loosely, and a kind of twittering was all the answer he got. He remembered his mobile phone, and went out, precipitately, into the back garden, where he phoned the police, and was sick.

  The police came, and were diligent. The old woman in the chair turned out to be a Miss Flossie Marsh. She and Cicely Fox had lived together in that house since 1949. Miss Marsh had not been seen for many years, and no one could be found who remembered her having spoken. Nor, despite all the efforts of police and doctors, did she speak, then, or ever. Miss Fox had always been briskly pleasant to her neighbours, but had not encouraged contact, or invited anyone in, ever. No one ever found any explanation for the torture that appeared to have been applied to Cicely Fox, clearly over a considerable period of time. Neither lady had any living relatives. The police found no sign of any intruder, other than Jack Smollett. The newspapers reported the affair briefly and ghoulishly. A verdict of murder was brought in, and the case lapsed.

  JACK SMOLLETT’S CLASS were temporarily subdued by Miss Fox’s fate. Jack’s miserable face made them uneasy. They fetched him coffee. They were kind to him.

  He couldn’t write. Cicely Fox’s death had destroyed his desire to write, as surely as the black-lead and the wash day had kindled it. He dreamed repeatedly, and had waking visions, of her poor tormented skin, her bleeding neck, her agonised jaw. He knew, he had seen, and he couldn’t get down, what had happened. He wondered if Miss Fox’s writing had in fact been a desperate therapy for an appalling life. There were layers and layers of those old scars. Not only on Miss Fox, on the mute Flossie Marsh also. He could not write that.

  The class, on the other hand, buzzed and hummed with the anticipated pleasure of writing it up, one day. They were vindicated. Miss Fox belonged after all in the normal world of their writings, the world of domestic violence, torture and shock-horror. They would write what they knew, what had happened to Cicely Fox, and it would be most satisfactorily therapeutic.

  The Pink Ribbon

  HE HELD THE MASS of hair—long, coarse, iron-grey—over his left hand, and brushed it firmly and vigorously with his right. It was greasy to the touch, despite the effort he and Mrs. Bright had put into washing it. He used an old-fashioned brush, with black bristles in a soft, coral-coloured rubber pad, in a lacquered black frame. He brushed and brushed. Mrs. Bright’s black face smiled approval. Mrs. Bright would have liked him to call her Deanna, which was her name, but he could not. It would have showed a lack of respect, and he respected and needed Mrs. Bright. And the name had inappropriate associations, nothing to do with a massively overweight Jamaican home help. He separated the hair deftly into three strips. Mrs. Bright remarked, as she frequently remarked, that it was very strong hair, it must have been lovely when Mado was young. “Maddy Mad Mado,” said the person in the wing-chair in a kind of growl. She was staring at the television screen, which was dead and grey and sprinkled with dust particles. Her face was dimly reflected in it, a heavy grey face with an angry mouth and dark eye-caverns. James began to plait the hair, pulling it tightly into a long serpent. He said, as he often said, that hairs thickened with age, they got stronger. Hairs in the nostrils, hairs on the heavy chin, grasses on a rock-face.

  Mrs. Bright, who knew the answer, asked what colour it had been, and was told that it had been fine, and coal-black. Blacker than yours, said James Ennis to Deanna Bright. Black as night. He combed and twisted. So deft he was, for a man, indeed for anyone, said Mrs. Bright. I was trained to do for myself, said James. In the Air Force, in the War. He came to the tail of the plait, and twisted an elastic band round it, three times. The woman in the chair winced and wriggled. James patted her shoulder. She was wearing a towelling gown, pinned at the neck with a nappy-pin for safety. It was white, which, although it showed every mark, was convenient to boil, in case of accidents, which happened constantly, of every description.

  Mrs. Bright watched James with approval, as he came to the end of the hair dressing. The pinning up of the fat coil, the precise insertion of thick steel hairpins. And finally, the
attachment of the crisp pink ribbon. A really pretty pink ribbon. A sweet colour, fresh. A lovely colour, she said, as she always said.

  “Yes,” said James.

  “You are a real kind man,” said Deanna Bright. The person in the chair plucked at the ribbon.

  “No, love,” said Deanna Bright. “Have this.” She handed her a silk scarf, which Mado fingered dubiously. “They like to touch soft things. I give a lot of them soft toys. They take comfort in them. Some folk will tell you it’s because they’re in their second childhood, but that’s not it. This is an end not a beginning, best to keep things straight. But it calms them to hold on, to stroke, to touch, isn’t it?”

  This was the day when Mrs. Bright took over whilst James “slipped out” to go to the library and do a little personal shopping. They took care to “settle” Mado before he left. James turned the television on, to distract her gaze and cover the sound of the door opening and shutting. There was a picture of childish flower-drawings and regulated grassy hummocks. There was smiley music. There were portly coloured creatures, purple, green, yellow, scarlet, titupping and trotting. Look at the little fairies and elves, said James, more or less without expression. “Burr,” said mad Mado, and then suddenly clearly, in a human voice, “They try to get her to dance, but she won’t.” “Look, there’s a scooter,” James persisted.

  Mrs. Bright said,

  “Where does she wander, I ask myself.”

  “Nowhere,” said James. “She sits here. Except when she tries to get out. When she rattles the door.”

  “We are all raised in glory,” said Deanna Bright. “When she’s raised, she’ll be a singing soul. So where is she wandering now?”

  “Her poor brain is a mass of thick plaques and tangles of meaningless stuff. Like moth-eaten knitting. There’s no one there, Mrs. Bright. Or not much of anyone.”

  “They took her into a dark a dark darkness and lost her,” said Mado.

  “Took who, dear?”

  “They don’t know,” said Mado vaguely. “Not much they don’t.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “Who’s they,” Mado repeated dully.

  “It’s no good,” said James. “She doesn’t know the meaning of words.”

  “You have to keep trying,” said Deanna Bright. “Go out now, Mr. Ennis, now she’s watching them. I’ll put her lunch together while you’re gone.”

  He went out, carrying his red shopping-bag, and once he was in the street he straightened his back, as he always did, breathing the outside air in great gulps, like a man who has been suffocating or drowning. He walked down streets of identical grey houses to the High Street, waited for his pension in the Post Office, bought sausages, mince and a small chicken in the butcher’s and vegetables from the amiable Turk on the corner. These were the people he talked to, the blood-stained butcher, the soft-voiced greengrocer, but never for long, for Mrs. Bright’s time was ticking away. They asked after his wife and he said she was as well as could be expected. She was full of life, always one for a joke, said the butcher, recalling someone James barely remembered and could not mourn. A kind lady, said the Turk. Yes, said James, as he always did when he didn’t want to argue. He would have liked to go into the bookshop, but there was no time, since he needed to go to Boots, and get his prescriptions, and hers. Things to calm two people whose calm lives were a form of frenzy.

  She used to do their shopping. She was the one who went out, as she was the one who had had a network of friends and acquaintances, some of them known to him, many of them not. She had not liked to tell him—no, she had liked not to tell him—where she was going or for how long. He hadn’t minded. He was good company for himself. Then one day a stranger had knocked at his door and shepherded his wife into the room, saying that he had found her wandering, that she had seemed to be lost. She was recovered by then, she threw her head back and shrilled with laughter. “Just think, James, I had got so abstracted, I’d gone back to Mecklenburgh Square, as if we’d just been out on one of our little outings to survey the damage, after the, after the—” “After the bombing,” said James.

  “Yes,” she said. “But there was no smoke without fire, this time.”

  “I think she needs a nice cup of tea,” said the friendly stranger. It was a moment when James could have known, and he had chosen not to. She had always been eccentric.

  The queue for prescriptions in Boots was long, and he was sent away for twenty minutes—not long enough for the bookshop, long enough to impinge on Deanna Bright. He wandered around the shop, an old man with a shock of white hair, in a crumpled macintosh. He didn’t want to stop near the nursing counter, and found himself aimlessly and unexpectedly in the baby department, amongst different packets of pads and animal-headed toothbrushes. There was a high, shining chrome gibbet hung with the plump, staggering television dolls, purple, green, yellow and red, smiling with black eyes and dark mouths in puppet-mask faces. They were all encased in suffocating polythene. They can’t breathe in there, James caught himself thinking, but this was not a sign of madness, no, but a sign of super-sanity, for he had been brooding, as anyone in his position occasionally must brood, he supposed, on what could be done, swiftly, with a plastic bag. They looked benign and inane. He came closer, checking his watch, and read their names, Tinky-Wink, Dipsy, Laa-Laa and Po. They had greyish shiny screens pinned on their round bellies, and antennae on their hooded heads. A symbiosis of a television and a one-year-old infant. Ingenious, after all.

  The woman behind the counter—busty, hennaed, bespectacled, smiley—said the Teletubbies were very popular, very popular. “They really love them.” Could she show him one?

  “Why not?” said James.

  She took Tinky-Wink and Po out of their shimmery sheaths and pressed their little bellies briskly, which caused them to chirp meaningless little songs. “They each have their own, you know, their signature song, easy to remember, for very little kids. They like remembering things, they like to hear them over and over.”

  “Do they?” said James vaguely.

  “Oh yes. And look how soft they are, and made of sensible towelling, you can get them really clean in a washing machine in no time, if there’s any sort of an accident. Durable, they are.”

  He had a vision of ragged bodies flailing, in a spin cycle. Not the circles of Heaven and Purgatory and Hell, but rag dolls flailing in a spin cycle.

  “I’ll take one.”

  “Which one would you like? Is it for a little girl or a little boy? A grandchild? Tinky-Wink is a boy—even though he has a handbag—and so is Dipsy. Laa-Laa and Po are girls. You can’t see the difference of course. Is it a grandson or a granddaughter?”

  “No,” said James. He said, “I don’t have children. It’s for someone else. I’ll take the green one. It’s a slightly bilious green and the name’s appropriate.”

  Dipsy was detached from his meat-hook and an identical Dipsy slid into view from behind him.

  “Shall I gift-wrap him, sir?”

  “Yes,” said James. That would precisely exhaust the twenty minutes.

  They had waited to start the child, until the War was over. And then, after the War, when he had been demobbed, and gone back to teaching classics to schoolboys, the conjured child had refused to enter the circle. It had had names—Camilla, Julius, when they were romantic, Blob and Tiny Tim when they were upset or annoyed. It answered to no name, it refused to be. Hitler took it, she used to say. He shook the parcel, covered with woolly lambs on a blue field. “Dipsy,” he said to it. “Dipsy fits the case, we’re all dipsy.” He wondered if he had been talking aloud in Boots. He looked around. No one was staring. Probably he had not.

  HE ALWAYS HAD to stiffen himself against opening his own front door. He was a self-disciplined man, who had been a good teacher, and a good officer in the Air Force, partly because he was equable. He believed, in a classical way, in good temper and reason. He knew that he himself was a vessel of seething rage, against fate, against age, against, Go
d help him (but there was no God) mad Mado herself, who was not responsible for his plight, or for hers, though she felt her own baffled bad temper from time to time, and was ready to blame him. He did not want to go into that captivity, with its sick smell and its lurching violence. As he always did, he took out his keys and let himself in. He even found a grim little smile for Deanna Bright.

  Mrs. Bright had given Mado her lunch—spooned soup, fingers of toast, a supermarket custard in a plastic cup. Mado fought being fed, but enough went down, Mrs. Bright said. Before Mrs. Bright, he had left Mado little meals in the fridge. This had ceased when he came home and found her at the table with a meal she had put together. It consisted of a conical heap of ground coffee and a puddle of damp flour, which she was attempting to spoon up with a dry avocado stone. He was still intellectually curious enough at that stage to wonder whether the form of the stone had recalled some primitive memory of the shape of a spoon.

  “No, dear,” he had said. “That won’t do, that’s all wrong.” And she had struck at him with the pointed end, bruising his cheek, and had swept coffee, flour, and plate, away onto the carpet. This then, was a tale of strangeness he could just about tell to a friend in a pub. It had an aesthetic horror to it that was pleasing. He was past that now, there was nothing left in him that wanted to tell anything to anyone, in a pub or anywhere else.

  “HOW HAS SHE BEEN?” he asked Deanna Bright.

  “Not difficult. Complaining a bit about too many visitors.”

  “Ah,” said James. He tried a joke. “I wish I knew who they were. I could do with someone to talk to.”

  “She says they’re spies. She says she sent them out on missions and they pretended to have been killed, but secretly they have got back.”

  “Spies,” said James.

  Deanna Bright’s face was alive with pity and concern.