Little Black Book of Stories

by A. S. Byatt

  She had always demonstrated a sturdy, even shocking, absence of the normal feminine reticences, or modesty, or even anxiety. She loved her own body, and he worshipped it.

  They went at it, she said later, tooth and claw, feather and velvet, blood and honey. This night he relived intimacies he had very slowly forgotten through years of war, and other snatched moments of blissful violence, and then the effacement of habit. He remembered feeling, and then thinking, no one else has ever known what this is really like, no one else can ever have got this right, or the human race would be different. And when he said so to her, she laughed her sharp laugh, and said he was presumptuous—I told you, James, everyone does it or almost—and then she broke down and kissed him all over his body, and her eyes were hot with tears as they moved like questing insects across his belly, and her muffled voice said, don’t believe me, I believe you, no one else ever . . .

  And tonight he didn’t know—he kept rising towards waking like a trout in a river and submerging again—whether he was a soul in bliss, or somehow caught in the toils of torment. His hands were nervy and agile and they were lumpen and groping. The woman rode him, curved in delight, and lay simultaneously like putty across him.

  And his eyes which had watered but never wept, were full of tears.

  THE NEXT DAY, he believed he might have called her up from the maze of his unconscious. But Deanna Bright, putting things away in the kitchen, rubbed away traces of scarlet lipstick from a glass he’d thought he’d rinsed, and looked a question.

  “Someone was being attacked in the street. I took her in.”

  “You want to watch out, Mr. Ennis. People aren’t always what they seem.”

  “We need to change her sheets again,” he said, changing the subject.

  SOMETHING HAD CHANGED, however. He had changed. He was afraid of forgetting things, but now he began to be tormented by remembering things, with vivid precision. People and things from his past slid and hissed into reality, obscuring the stained carpet and the wing-chair in which Mado chattered to Sasha, or turned the lime-green dolly in clumsy fingers. He told himself he was like a drowning man, with his life flashing before his eyes, and stopped to wonder exactly how that would be, would you see the quick and the dead before your real staring underwater pupils, or would they wind on a speeded-up film inside the dark theatre of the waterlogged head? What happened to him now, was that as he woke out of a nap over his book, or stumbled into his bedroom undoing his buttons, he saw visions, heard sounds, smelled smells, long gone, but now there to be, so to speak, read and checked. Dead Germans in the North African desert, their caps, their water-cans. The old woman he and Madeleine had pushed under the table on the worst night of the Blitz, and revived with whisky when she seemed to be having a heart attack. She had had one red felt slipper with a pom-pom and one bare foot. He saw her gnarled toes, he fitted Madeleine’s sheepskin slippers to the trembling feet, he smelled—for hours together—the smell of smouldering London when they went out to survey the damage. Grit in his nose, grit in his lungs, grit of stones and explosives and cinders of flesh and bone. They had walked out after the night of May 10th and seen the damage at Westminster Abbey and the gutted House of Commons, had strolled through the parks, seeing fenced-off unexploded bombs and children sailing boats on the Round Pond. He saw now the fencing and the deck chairs, the rubble and the children.

  He remembered the fear, but also the young blood in him driven by the fact of survival and the desire to survive. He had been afraid—he remembered the moan of the sirens, the bang and whine of the big bombs, the grinding drone of the bomber engines, and Madeleine’s wild laughter as the crashes were elsewhere. Death was close. Friends you were meeting for dinner, who lived in your head as you set off to meet them, never came, because they were mangled meat under brick and timber. Other friends who stared in your memory as the dead stare whilst they take up the final shape your memory will give them, suddenly turned up on the doorstep in lumpen living flesh, bruised and dirty, carrying bags of salvaged belongings, and begged for a bed, for a cup of tea. Fatigue blurred everyone’s vision and sharpened their senses. He remembered seeing a mother and child lying under a bench, arms wrapped round each other, and dreading to stir them, in case they were dead. But they were only homeless walkers, sleeping the sleep of the exhausted.

  She did not enter these new windows on lost life, Madeleine. The sound of her laughter, that once, was the nearest thing.

  When “this” began, he had known that it required more courage to get up every day, to watch over Mado’s wandering mind and shambling body, than anything he, or they, had faced in that past. And he had drawn himself up, like a soldier, to do his duty, deciding that it was in both their interests that he should never think of Madeleine, for his duty was here, now, to Mado, whose need was extreme.

  THE FACT THAT HE WAS unsettled unsettled Mado, who became what James and Deanna Bright refrained from calling “naughty” for that implied the impossible second childhood. “Wild” James called it. “Restless” was Deanna Bright’s word. She began to break things and to hide things. He found her dropping their silver cutlery, inherited from his parents in a plush-lined black case—piece by piece out of the window, listening to the ring of metal on pavement. The Teletubbies had odd little meals made of pink splats of custard gurgling from a lavender machine, and “toasts” with smiley faces which cascaded from a toaster. Excess food was slurped up by an excitable vacuum cleaner called Noo-noo. The splatted custard (she hated pink) roused Mado to brief bursts of competitive energy and the carpet was covered with milk and honey, with baby cream and salad dressing. And with whisky. She poured his Glenfiddich into the hearthrug. The smell of it recalled Dido but the libation produced no spirit. James bought another bottle. The smell lingered, mixed with the ghostly smoke and ashes of burning London in 1941.

  THERE CAME A NIGHT when she reappeared and reappeared after he had settled her, whining in the doorway as he tried to construe Aeneid VI. “I can’t do it,” she said, “I can’t get it,” but could not say what she could not do or get. For a dreadful moment James raised his hand to slap or punch the moaning creature, and she backed away, bubbling. Time for Teletubbies to go to bed, said James instead, in a jingly voice. He pushed her—gently—into her room, and pushed Dipsy into her arms. She tossed Dipsy back at him, snorting angrily, and turned her face to the wall. He picked up Dipsy by the foot and went back to the Underworld and its perpetual twilight. He found himself torturing Dipsy, winding his little wrist round, and again, driving hairpins into the terrytowelling plump belly. As long as the little unkind acts were harmless, his rational mind said, stabbing.

  The doorbell rang. He waited for Mado to respond—if it disturbed her, he wouldn’t open, it would be unbearable. But she was still. The bell sounded again. At the third shrilling, he went down. There she was in the doorway, the dark woman, in the red silk dress, like a poppy.

  “I come bearing gifts,” she said. “To thank you. May I come in?”

  “You may,” he said, with clumsy ceremony. “You may have a glass of whisky, if you will.”

  He imagined the elegant nose wrinkled at the smell of his rooms.

  “Here,” she said, handing him a box of Black Magic chocolates, tied with a scarlet ribbon. Chocolates out of the cinemas of his youth, which had somehow persisted into the present. “And here,” she said, lifting her other hand, “for her. I know she’d rather have the red one. Have Po.”

  He realised Dipsy and the hairpin were still in his hand. Po was done up in what he thought of as cellophane, a beautiful word, also from those earlier days, related to diaphane, although he knew really that she was smiling out of a plastic bag, also done up with a red ribbon. He put down Dipsy, accepted both presents, put them down on the table, and went to fetch whisky, large whiskies, one on the rocks, one neat.

  “I didn’t think you’d come back.”

  “Ah, but I had to. And you live so sadly, I thought you might be pleased to see me.”r />
  “O I am. But I didn’t expect you.”

  THEY SAT AND TALKED. She crossed and uncrossed her long legs, and he looked at her ankles with intense pleasure and without desire. He remembered Madeleine, running away on moorland, looking back to make sure he could catch her. Dido asked him polite questions about himself, and turned away those he asked in return, so that he found himself, as the smoky spirit rose in his nostrils, telling her about his life, about the returning folk who occupied his flat, mingling with whoever or whatever mad Mado had conjured up. We are quite a crowd, quite a throng of restless spirits, he said, these days, thick as leaves and only two of us flesh and blood. I find myself in odd times and places, quite out of mind until now.

  “Such as?”

  “Today I remembered packing a crate of oranges and lemons in Algiers. They were lovely things— golden and yellow and shining—and we chose them carefully, the Arab and me, and packed them in woodshavings and nailed the lid down. And a friend who was a pilot brought them back for her, as a surprise, they couldn’t get citrus fruit in the War, you know, they craved for it.”

  “And when she opened the crate,” said Dido, “she could smell the half-forgotten smell of citrus oil and juice. And she pulled away the wood-shavings, and put her hand in, like someone looking for treasure in a Lucky Dip at a village fete. And her fingers came up covered with moss-green powder, a lovely colour in the abstract, the colour of lichens and mould. And she took the mouldy lemon out, in its little nest of silver paper, and looked at the orange below, and that simply dissolved into beautiful pale-green powder, like a puff-ball. And she went on, and on, getting dust everywhere, piling them up on newspaper, and there was not one good one.”

  “That’s not true. She said it was a—treasure-chest of delights. She said they were—unbelievably delicious. She said she saved and savoured every one.”

  “She was always a great liar. As you always knew. It was a wonderful gift. It had rotted on airfields and in depots. It was an accident that it mouldered. She thanked you for the gift.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Don’t you know how I know?”

  “I am an old man. I am going mad. You are a phantasm.”

  “Touch me.”

  “I daren’t.”

  “I said, touch me.”

  He stood up unsteadily and crossed the swirling space between them. He put the tips of his fingers on the silky hair, and then he touched, chastely and with terror, the warm young skin of her arm.

  “Palpable,” he said, finding an arcane word from the humming in his brain.

  “You see?”

  “No, I don’t. I believe I believe you are there.” He said, “What else do you know? That I might have known, and don’t know.”

  “Sit down and I’ll tell you.”

  “SHE USED TO SAY, Hitler had destroyed the days of her youth, and the quiet days of her marriage, and the child she might have had. And given her drama—too much drama—and dissatisfaction, and eternal restlessness, so she could never be content. She thought these thoughts with great violence, most especially when she was living the quiet days that were simply a semblance of quiet days, a simulacrum of a life, so to speak. Though if a kitchen and a plate of macaroni cheese are a phantasm maybe, just maybe, they are more exciting than when they stretch before you as your settled and invariable fate.”

  “As it is now,” he said. Thinking of custard on the floor.

  “The worst time—the most unreal—was his, was your, embarkation leave. Before you went where you couldn’t say where you were going, where the orange groves and the lemons bloomed. So you sat both, day by day, for those two weeks, and she watched the clock ticking, and mended your shirt-collar like a wax doll housewife with her head bent over the darning mushroom in the dusty blue heels. And you went out now and then together to survey the damage—churches burst open like smashed fruit, plate glass glittering on pavements the length of Oxford Street and Knights-bridge, and you talked rather carefully of nothing much, as though there was a competition in banality. And when you left, she knew she was not pregnant, and gave you a little peck on the cheek—acting the little English wife—no Romeo and Juliet kissing—and off you went, with your kit-bag, into the dark, temporary or permanent.”

  “Yes,” said James.

  “Yes,” she said. “And then she lay on the floor and howled like an animal, rolled up and down as though she was in extreme agony. And then she got up and had a bath, and painted her toenails and fingernails with her remaining varnish, and rough-dried her hair, and turned on some soothing music, and became— someone else.

  “And then the doorbell rang. And there you were—there he was—on the doorstep. She thought it was a ghost. The world was full of the walking dead in those days.”

  “The embarkation was cancelled,” said James, reasonably then, reasonably now.

  “So she hit out, at the smiling face, with all her strength.”

  “And drew blood,” said James. “With her wedding ring.”

  “And kissed the blood,” said Dido, “and kissed and kissed the mark her hand had made.”

  “But we survived,” said James. He said, “Coming back, being a revenant, was always dangerous. I remember arriving at night back in 1943 when the V-1s were falling. I remember arriving at night—I’d hitched a lift in a troop-lorry—and being put down near some depot at Waterloo. There weren’t any buses or taxis to be had, and the sounds of what might have been them approaching in the blackout were sometimes those damned flying bombs, like monstrous clockwork, that ticked and then went out. And then exploded. And the sky was full of flames and smoke, colours you couldn’t see now, because the sky is always red over London and you can’t see the stars. Those things didn’t need the full moon, like the bombers did, but we still felt uneasy when it was full. It was full moon that night. So I walked, carrying as much of my kit as I could, falling into potholes, and listening for the damned things. And when I’d walked for an hour or two, I saw I was walking in the general direction of a steady blaze. Tongues licking up, that glow, brick-dust in the air, walls hot to the touch. And the closer I got to home, the closer to the crater, so to speak. And I came up against barriers, and bucket-chains, and one fire-engine feebly spraying. And I ran. I ran up against the barriers, and the wardens tried to turn me back, and I said, that’s my house, my wife’s in there. And I pushed someone over, and ran into the dust. And saw the house was a shell. The roof and the bedrooms were rubble on the downstairs rooms. I thought she must be in the shelter, and I started pulling at bricks, and burned beams, and I burned my hands. And they pulled at me from behind, shouting. And I saw the pit in the living-room floor, and there was someone pulling at my collar. So I looked up, and there she was, in a nightdress shredded to ribbons by glass and a fireman’s jacket, with her hair burned to a birdsnest and her face black as night with no eyebrows—and sooty hot hands with broken nails—”

  “There was nothing left,” said Dido. “Except each other.” She said, “You said you were Aeneas looking for Creusa in burning Troy. And she said to you, ‘I’m not a ghost, I’m flesh and blood.’ And they kissed, with soot on their tongues, and the burning city in their lungs. Flesh and blood.”

  James began to shake. He was exceedingly tired and confused and somehow certain that all this presaged his own death, or madness at least, and if he went mad or died, what would become of mad Mado?

  “Who are you?” he said, in a tired old voice. “Why are you here?”

  “Don’t you know?” she said kindly. “I am the Fetch.”

  “Fetch?”

  She sat in his chair, smiling and waiting, sleek and dark in red silk.

  “Madeleine?” said James.

  “In a sense. You would never listen to anything about spiritual things. You always made cynical jokes, when it was a question of astrology, or clairvoyance, or the otherworld.”

  “Astronomy is mystery enough,” said James as he always said. “A great mystery. We used
to fly under the stars thick as daisies. You can’t see them now.”

  “There are many things in heaven and earth you can’t see, James. The etheric body can get separated from—from the clay. It can wander in churchyards. It needs to be set free. As she needs to be set free.”

  “I know what you are telling me,” said James. “You must know I’ve thought about it.”

  “You don’t do it, because you would be set free yourself, and you think that would be wrong. But you don’t think of her, or you would know what she wants. What I want.”

  “Dido,” said James, using the name for the first time. “She doesn’t know what she wants, she can’t rightly want or not want, her skull is full of plaques and tangles—”

  “You make me angry,” said Dido in Madeleine’s voice. “All those young Germans in the war, with their lives in front of them, and their girls and their parents, that was all right, your own young pilots on missions with wonderful brains humming with cleverness and hope and rational fear—that was all right. But a miserable hulk decorated with a pink ribbon—”

  “You could always twist anything.”

  “Intelligence. O yes. I could always twist anything.”

  She stood up to go. James stood up to see her out. He meant not to say anything, to be strong, but he heard his own voice,

  “Shall I see you again?”

  Black silk hair, red silk dress, anachronistic silk stockings with perfect seams up the perfect legs.

  “That depends,” said Dido. “As you know. That depends.”

  The next day, he knew she had been there, for the signs were solid. Lipstick on the whisky glass, beribboned chocolates, little red Po smiling at him in her polythene casing. He imagined that Deanna Bright looked at him oddly. She refused a chocolate when he offered one. She picked up Po with sturdy black fingers.

  “Shall I get it out, then?”

  “No,” he said. “No, leave it in the bag for the present.”

  “I see you had company again,” said Deanna Bright.